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REPROOF 



AMERICAN CHURCH. 



BY THE 



BISHOP OF OXFORD. 



EXTRACTED FROM A 



$istorn of tl)e Protestant episcopal G^urd) in America, 
by Samuel 1 " wilberforce, a.m. 



AN INTRODUCTION 

BY AN AMERICAN CHURCHMAN 



NEW YORK: 
WILLIAM HARNED, 5 SPRUCE STREET 



1846. 






S. W. BENEDICT, 
Ster. and Print., 16 Spruce Street. 






INTRODUCTION. 



It is not probable that the reader has ever seen the History men- 
tioned in our title. That a History of the American Church, from 
its earliest date down to the death of Bishop White, written by a 
dignitary of the mother Church, distinguished alike by his honored 
name and elevated rank, should be almost unknown in this country, is 
a singular and very peculiar fact. No people are more sensitive than 
ourselves to the opinions of foreigners ; and American Episcopalians 
naturally feel much interest in the views entertained of them by 
their English brethren. Indeed, the interest is not confined to such 
views, but extends to whatever affects the English Church. The 
parties which agitate the Establishment are reflected in our contro- 
versies ; and the tracts and volumes issued by the theological com- 
batants on the other side of the water, are republished and eagerly 
perused on this. Yet here is a history of ourselves, in no small 
degree eulogistic, and on various accounts claiming our attention, 
which has been virtually suppressed. 

It is indeed true, that as soon as the book reached our shores, 
one or two of our " enterprising publishers" announced their inten- 
tion of reprinting it, and one of the proposed editions was to have 
been introduced to the notice of the Church under the auspices of 
a Right Reverend Editor. But these announcements have been 
followed by " expressive silence." More than twelve months have 
elapsed, and the Church is still without an American copy of the 
History. This concealment of Dr. Wilberforce's work is obviously 
intentional, and not accidental. The very title of the book and the 
name of the author would have secured a rapid sale for the reprint. 
Some weighty motive must have induced our publishers to aban- 
don their original intention, at the sacrifice of pecuniary interest. 
The motive is obvious, and probably one or more Southern 



Bishops have exerted their influence. The author of the His- 
tory, in the course of his work, advances certain doctrines on the 
subject of Slavery, and of Caste in the Church, which it is 
thought inconvenient to discuss, and which cannot be admitted in 
this Republic without sealing the condemnation of almost every 
Christian sect among us, and overwhelming our own Church with 
shame and confusion. There are, it is to be feared, but few among 
our twelve hundred clergymen, who, on reading the History, would 
not find their consciences whispering, "Thou art the man," and 
who would not be anxious to conceal the volume from their pa- 
rishioners. Hence its suppression. 

It is common to personify the Church, and to speak of her as of 
some spotless celestial being ; and yet she, in fact, consists of her 
clerical and lay members, each one of whom must personally an- 
swer at the bar of Christ for his participation in every sin commit- 
ted by the Church. Surely, it would be more becoming Christian 
men to inquire how far they are individually guilty of the offences 
charged upon them by Bishop Wilberforce, than to endeavor to stifle 
investigation, by burying in oblivion the faithful and Christian re- 
buke of their English brother. 

Religious establishments tend to render the clergy obsequious to 
the civil ruler, and our voluntary system tempts them to do homage 
to the most capricious and irresponsible of all tyrants, the will of 
the multitude. Let us see what true and faithful allegiance our 
"Primitive and Apostolic Church" has borne to this American 
despot. 

On the 21st August, 1831, occurred the negro insurrection and 
massacre at Southampton, Virginia. This disastrous event neces- 
sarily directed public attention, both at the North and the South, to 
the subject of Slavery. In one portion of the Union, stronger fet- 
ters were forged for the bondman, and greater efforts made to banish 
to Africa the free colored man, whose presence it was supposed 
quickened the aspirations of the slave for freedom. In the other 
portion, this insurrection impressed on a few pious and reflecting 
minds a conviction both of the moral and political evils of slavery, 
and of the duty of combined action for its total abolition. In 1832 
the New England Anti-Slavery Society was formed, and the suc- 
ceeding year witnessed the organization of the American Anti- 
Slavery Society. Auxiliary associations sprang rapidly into being, 
funds were liberally bestowed, presses were established, and publi- 



cations portraying the abominations of the system were abundantly 
scattered throughout the land. 

This agitation both alarmed and irritated the slaveholders ; and 
while on the one hand they endeavored to intimidate the Abolition- 
ists by their murderous violence, they appealed to the selfish pas- 
sions of the Northern community, by promising their votes and 
their trade to such only as would aid in suppressing the discussion 
of slavery. Immediately, our contending factions and our commer- 
cial cities rivalled each other in demonstrations of sympathy for 
their " Southern brethren," and of abhorrence for Abolitionists. 
The clergy, yielding to the blast, generally observed a prudent si- 
lence, while a few, to prove their freedom from fanaticism, assailed 
the Abolitionists for their violence and rashness, protesting, how- 
ever, against being considered the advocates of slavery " in the ab- 
stract." 

On the clergy of the South, however, a more onerous task was 
imposed. The Northern movement was a religious one, impelled 
by a belief of the sinfulness of slavery. Hence it became import- 
ant that Southern consciences should be encased in mail, impenetra- 
ble to anti-slavery missiles. The fabrication of such a panoply was 
consigned to the ministers of Christ, and significant hints were given 
them that they must not shrink from the work. A meeting of 
slaveholders in Mississippi, after resolving that any individual who 
should circulate anti-slavery papers in the State " is justly worthy, 
in the sight of God and man, of immediate death," voted " that the 
Clergy of the State of Mississippi be hereby recommended at 
once to take a stand upon this subject, and that their further silence 
in relation to this subject (slavery) will, in our opinion, be subject 
to serious censure.'''' 

This pastoral admonition from the Lynchers was received with 
due reverence by those to whom it was directed. Presently two 
Mississippi Presbyteries passed resolutions in favor of the Christian 
character of slavery. A Mississippi divine published an elaborate 
vindication of the system, and a Methodist periodical in the State an- 
nounced that it would " recognize the right of man to hold property 
in man." 

In other slave States the clergy were suddenly aroused to a new 
energy in vindicating the divine institution of human bondage. 
Presbyteries, Methodist conferences, Baptist associations, individual 
ministers, were busily at work descanting on the sin of Ham, and 



the curse pronounced on Canaan, discussing Hebrew servitude, and 
provin 0- that negro slavery was not forbidden in the New Testa- 
ment. As a specimen of the fulminations launched by some of 
these servants of the Most High against Abolitionists, we may cite 
the peroration of an address to a meeting of slaveholders in South 
Carolina by the Rev. Mr. Postell, of the Methodist Church. " Shun 
abolition as you would the Devil. Do your duty as citizens and 
Christians, and in heaven you will be rewarded, and delivered from 
abolitionism." 

In this mighty rivalry in preaching smooth things to the slave- 
holders, " the sects " were not permitted to gain a triumph. On 
the 27th November, 1836, the Rev. George W. Freeman, after 
morning service, ascended the pulpit of Christ Church, Raleigh, 
North Carolina, and announced to his delighted hearers the good 
news that the slavery of white men and of black men, of the wise 
and of the simple, of the learned and of the ignorant, was sanc- 
tioned by God, and approved by Jesus Christ and his holy Apostles. 
This commissioned ambassador of the Redeemer proclaimed, " that 

WO MAN NOR SET OF MEN IN OUR DAY, UNLESS THEY CAN PRODUCE A 
NEW REVELATION FROM HEAVEN, ARE ENTITLED TO PRONOUNCE 

Slavery wrong ; and that Slavery as it exists at the present 

DAY IS AGREEABLE TO THE ORDER OF DlVINE PROVIDENCE." 

The fact that any institution involves duties, proves its lawful- 
ness, since no duty can attach to a sinful practice. Hence our 
preacher, after employing the morning of the Lord's day in ex- 
pounding ihe divine rights of the slaveholders, devoted the afternoon 
of the same holy time in proclaiming their ditties. The slaveholder 
was reminded that he was under a moral obligation to punish his 
slaves when they deserved punishment ; but he must not be too se- 
vere, nor chastise when in a passion ; nor ought he to overwork them. 
He is bound, moreover, to have the slave children baptized, and 
orally taught to say the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Com- 
mandments. " It is not necessary," said the man of God, " that 
they should be taught to read ;" but, nevertheless, the master was 
declared to be as responsible for the souls of his slaves as for those 
of his own children ! Such are the duties which spring from this 
Scriptural Institution ; duties which, fortunately for the master's 
convenience, involve no regard for the marriage of his slaves, no 
respect for their conjugal or parental rights, and impose no restric- 
tions on the sale of men, women, and children in the market ; at 
least, no obligations of this sort were adverted to by the preacher. 



These two sermons certainly formed the most acceptable offering 
which any clergyman had yet laid on the altar of slavery. The 
hints about the bondage of white men, the necessity of a new revela- 
tion, before slavery could be pronounced wrong, and the connection 
of religious duties with the institution, could not fail of convincing 
the slaveholder, that in the Episcopal Church he would find an 
asylum from the taunts and reproaches of the civilized world ; that 
from her altars he could gather balm for his wounded conscience, 
and that in her courts, he could, without distraction, form his schemes 
of traffic in human beings and forge the chains by which they 
were to be held in subjection. It was, of course, important that 
slaveholders generally should participate in the joyful intelligence 
imparted to the congregation of Christ Church. The news might 
be spread by the press, but what assurance could be given that the 
gratifying declarations made by Mr. Freeman, a private and obscure 
Presbyter, were authorized by competent ecclesiastical authority ? 
The sermons were published under the imposing title of " The 
Rights and Duties of Slaveholders," and bore the following 
imprimatur from the Bishop of the Diocese : 

» Raleigh, Nov. 30, 1S36. 
Rev. and Dear Brother — I listened with most unfeigned pleasure 
to the discourses delivered last Sunday, on the character of slavery 
and the duties of masters. And as I learn a publication of them is 
solicited, I beg from a conviction of their being urgently called tor 
at the present time, that you will not withhold your consent. 
With high regard, your affectionate friend, 

and Brother in the Lord, 

L. S. IVES. 
To the Rev. George W. Freeman." 

This letter was obviously written, not for its professed purpose 
of overcoming Mr. Freeman's reluctance to appear in print, but to 
let the slaveholders of North Carolina know, that although their 
Bishop was a Northern man, his conscience was thoroughly acclimat- 
ed ; and that bold and startling as were the doctrines of the Raleigh 
preacher, they would be maintained in all their length and breadth 
by Episcopal authority. The Church in North Carolina, by this 
authoritative publication, far exceeded all the " sects," in the slave 
region, in her fearless championship of slavery in the " abstract," 
and " as it exists at the present day." But the diocese was not 
permitted long to enjoy this proud pre-eminence. Her sister of 
South Carolina quickly shared it with her. The society for " the 



8 

advancement of Christianity," (!) consisting of clergymen and lay- 
men, with the Bishop at their head, seized upon Freeman's pam- 
phlet, and reprinted it, imprimatur and all, as a religious tract for 
gratuitous distribution. 

But there was still one circumstance, which, in times of alarm 
and despondency, was calculated to weaken the confidence of the 
slaveholder in the sirength and permanency of the fortress which 
had thus kindly opened its gates to receive him. Most of the reli- 
gious denominations of the South were connected with their north- 
ern brethren by general ecclesiastical judicatories. Already had 
alarming discussions occurred in the Presbyterian Assembly, and 
the Methodist Conference, and the Baptist Mission Board, and it 
was painfully apparent that in these bodies " the rights and duties 
of slaveholders " were viewed in very different colors from the 
glowing tints in which Freeman had painted them. The Episcopal 
Church at the South was subject to the jurisdiction of the General 
Convention, and what security could be given that a body embrac- 
ing Northern as well as Southern delegates, would not repudiate the 
doctrines of the Raleigh Sermons '! Lynch law could indeed con- 
trol the Southern pulpit as well as the Southern press ; but the con- 
sciences and the characters of the slaveholders were assailed from 
the North. There the Dissenters were gradually abandoning the 
cause of human bondage. Under the strong pressure of public 
opinion, and in utter contempt of the well-known sentiments of the 
Church of England, and indeed of the moral sense of Christendom, 
could it be hoped that the Northern section of the Episcopal Church 
would, in General Convention, tolerate, much less approve of the 
extreme, ultra pro-slavery views of the Rev. George W. Freeman 1 

All questions of this sort were most explicitly answered by the 
last Convention, as appears by an extract from the minutes of the 
House of Clerical and Lay Delegates : 

" The following: message "was received : ' House of Bishops, 
Oct. 22, 1S44. The House of Bishops inform the House of Clerical 
and Lay Deputies, that they have nominated the Rev. George VV. 
Freeman, D.D., rector of Immanuel Church, Delaware, a mis- 
sionary Bishop, to exercise Episcopal functions in the State of Ar- 
kansas, and in the Indian Territory, south of 36 1-2 degrees of 
parallel of latitude, and to exercise Episcopal supervision over the 
Missions of the Church in the Republic of Texas. Attest, Jona- 
than M. Wainwrio'ht, Sec'y.' 

" On motion of Rev. Dr. Tyng, the nomination of the Bishop of 
Arkansas and Texas (as above) was unanimously assented to." 



It was not enough thus to elevate the reckless defender of 
slavery to the high and holy office of a Bishop in the Church of 
God, but he must be selected as an apostle to Texas ! There was, 
indeed, a peculiar significance in this selection. The odium in 
which the people of Texas were held by the Christian community 
at large, arose not merely from their general profligacy, but also, 
and chiefly, from their conduct in relation to slavery. Taking pos- 
session of lands belonging to Mexico, they re-established slavery 
upon the very soil from which it had been recently banished by 
that Roman Catholic government. To secure to themselves the 
unmolested enjoyment of their human chattels, they raised the 
standard of rebellion, and with the aid of Southern slaveholders 
erected themselves into an independent Republic. Having thus, 
as they professed, achieved their own liberty, they adopted a con- 
stitution rendering the bondage of others hopeless and perpetual ; 
and outraging alike the dictates of nature and of justice, ordained 
that no free mulatto should ever live in Texas, thus dooming their 
own colored offspring, for all time to come, to slavery or to exile ! 

The Southern slaveholders were exceedingly anxious that Texas 
should be admitted into the Union, for the double purpose of 
strengthening the slave interest, and opening a new market for the 
benefit of the breeding States. For the same reasons, in addition 
to the odious character of the Texans, the proposed annexation 
was resisted by the almost united moral feeling of the whole North. 
The question of annexation was agitating the nation when the Con- 
vention assembled, and the selection of Freeman as Bishop of Texas 
was virtually, whether so intended or not, a repudiation by the Pro- 
testant Episcopal Church in General Convention assembled, of the 
moral objections urged against the admission of that Republic into 
our confederacy. The Church sent to the Texans a man who, 
she knew, would confirm and strengthen them by apostolic instruc- 
tion and benediction in those great principles of their constitution, 
which had excited the execration of the Christian world. 

Let us now take a view of that institution, which, the Texan 
Bishop assures us, enjoys the approval of Christ and his Apostles. 
He tells us, " There was in general no distinction of color, no pre- 
vailing difference in the conformation of the features and limbs, no 
striking dissimilarity in the intellectual powers, to mark the line of 
separation between the masters and their bondmen, and stamp them 
as different races of men. IS T o peculiarity of this kind existed which 



10 

would have prevented those who were slaves, had they been placed 
in other circumstances, from taking rank in society, and looking 
forward to the highest distinctions in the community. Had they not 
been slaves, they would have become magistrates, nobles, or rulers ; 
respected by multitudes as equals, or venerated as superiors." 

Here, it will be observed, we have none of the usual nonsense 
about the curse of Canaan, nor of the usual blasphemy about negroes 
being created by God for slaves. Jesus Christ and his Apostles 
approved of the bondage of while men as intelligent as their masters ; 
and of course the whole of our present bench of Bishops, including 
Bishop Freeman himself, might, under certain circumstances, be 
lawfully reduced to slavery, and righteously held as chattels by 
Christian men. 

We are expressly referred in the Sermons, to Roman Slavery, as 
that which enjoyed the sanction of the great Head of the Church. 
And what was Roman Slavery ? Our answer to this question is 
taken from a very learned work, whose statements are all verified 
by references to Roman authorities.* 

" The slave had no protection against the avarice, rage, or lust 
of the master, whose authority was founded in absolute property; 
and the bondman was viewed less as a human being subject to 
arbitrary dominion, than as an inferior animal, dependent wholly on 
the will of his owner. At first, the master possessed the uncon- 
trolled power of life and death. He might kill, mutilate or torture 
his slaves, for any or no offence ; he might force them to become 
gladiators or prostitutes. The temporary unions of male with female 
slaves were formed and dissolved at his command ; families and 
friends were separated when he pleased. The laws recognized no 
obligation upon the owners of slaves, to furnish them with food and 
clothing, or to take care of them in sickness. Slaves could have no 
property but by the sufferance of their master, for whom they 
acquired everything, and with whom they could form no engage- 
ments which would be binding on him. The master might transfer 
his rights by either sale or gift, or might bequeath them by will. A 
master selling, giving or bequeathing a slave, sometimes made it a 
provision that he should never be carried abroad, or that he should 
be manumitted on a fixed day ; or that, on the other hand, he should 
never be emancipated, or that he should be kept in chains for life. 

* Blair's " Inquiry into the State of Slavery among the Romans, from the 
earliest period, to the establishment of the Lombards in Italy." 



11 

While slaves turned the handmill, they were generally chained, 
and had a broad wooden collar, to prevent them from eating the 
grain. The f urea, which in later language means a gibbet, was, in 
older dialect, used to denote a wooden fork or collar, which was 
made to bear upon their shoulders or around their necks, as a mark 
of disgrace as much as an uneasy burden. Fetters and chains were 
much used for punishment or restraint, and were, in some instances, 
worn by slaves during life, through the sole authority of the master. 
Porters at the gates of the rich were generally chained. Field 
laborers worked for the most part in irons posterior to the first ages 
of the Republic. Some persons made it their business to catch 
runaway slaves.* The runaway, when taken, was severely punished 
by authority of the master, or by the Judge at his desire; some- 
times with crucifixion, amputation of a foot, or by being sent to fight 
as a gladiator, with wild beasts; but most frequently by being 
branded on the brow with letters indicative of his crime. Cruel 
masters sometimes hired torturers by profession, or had such per- 
sons in their establishments, to assist them in punishing their slaves. 
The noses, and ears, and teeth of slaves were often in danger from an 
enraged owner ; and sometimes the eyes of a great offender were 
put out. Crucifixion was very frequently made the fate of a 
wretched slave for trifling misconduct, or from mere caprice. By a 
decree passed by the Senate, if a master was murdered, when his 
slaves might possibly have aided him, all his household within reach 
were held as implicated and deserving of death ; and Tacitus relates 
an instance in which a family of four hundred were all executed." 

Such was the slavery which the Bishop of Texas tells us was 
found " extensively established in the Roman Empire, embracing 
nearly all the civilized world, by our Saviour, when he appeared on 
earth ; and that neither He, nor his inspired Apostles after him, ever 
expressed any disapprobation of it, or left on record a single precept 
directing its discontinuance ; and what then is the conclusion ? Why, 
surely this much, if nothing farther, that no man nor set of men in 

* This profession is not unknown among ourselves, as appears from the 
following notice in the Sumner County (Alabama) Whig. 
"NEGRO DOGS. 

"The undersigned having bought the entire pack of Negro Dogs (of the 
Hay and Allen stock) he now proposes to catch runaway negroes. His 
charges will be Three Dollars per day for hunting, and Fifteen Dollars for 
catching a runaway. He resides three and one-half miles north of Livingston, 
near the lower Jones' Bluff road. WILLIAM G 4MBEL 

" Nov. 6, 1845— 6m." 



12 

our day, unless they can produce a new revelation' from Heaven, 

ARE ENTITLED TO PRONOUNCE IT WRONG " ! ! 

Let us next endeavor to acquire some idea of the number of the 
bondmen, whose prison-house, if we believe the Right Rev. Texan 
Father in God, was barred and bolted by Him who gave his life a 
ransom for many. Gibbon estimates the whole slave population 
of the Roman Empire in the reign of the Emperor Claudius at sixty 
millions (I. 53), and Blair regards this estimate as much too small. 

It is important to ascertain how this prodigious multitude were 
reduced to bondage ; because, as our spiritual champions of slavery in- 
variably omit to explain the Scriptural process of converting free men 
into slaves, we are left to seek instruction in this branch of our duty 
from the Romans ; since, as in no one instance were they rebuked 
by Christ and his Apostles, for any of their various contrivances for 
manufacturing slaves, the conclusion is, surely, " this much, if nothing 
further, that no man nor set of men in our da} r , unless they can pro- 
duce a new revelation from Heaven, are entitled'' to pronounce 
any of the Roman methods of making slaves, " wrong." 

The most prolific source of slavery was war. Livy informs us 
that after the fall of the Samnites at Aquilone, about 36,000 prison- 
ers were sold ; and Plutarch, that 150,000 of the people of Epirus 
were sold for the benefit of the army under Paulus JErnilius ; and we 
learn from Cicero, that when Pindenissus was taken, the inhabitants 
were made slaves. Hence, should a Mexican force hereafter make 
an incursion into Texas, and carry off the Bishop, his wife and 
children, and sell them to different masters, under whom they should 
be compelled to spend their days in unceasing toil — condemned to 
all the misery and degradation of Roman bondmen, — the Eishop 
would have the consolation of knowing that the treatment he experi- 
enced was in perfect consistency with that Gospel which he had 
himself preached. 

Commerce was another mode of acquiring slaves. A prodigious 
slave-trade was carried on in the countries bordering on the Euxine, 
with various Provinces in Asia, with Thrace, and even with Spain 
and Britain. Here we learn how presumptuous it is, to denounce 
the African slave-trade as sinful. 

The Profession of Christianity was occasionally visited by the 
Romans with slavery. At the present day, it affords no security 
against American slavery, nor deliverance from it. 

There were still four other modes of acquiring slaves, which are 



13 

particularly interesting to us ; because, having been copied by us 
from the Roman law, we can have no scruples about their lawful- 
ness : for had they been wrong, Christ and his Apostles, according 
to Bishop Freeman, would have condemned them. 

1. The sale of children by their fathers — with us the privilege is 
confined to the sale of children by a slave-mother. In the Bishop's 
Diocese, this privilege was nearly converted into a necessity, by the 
constitutional provision which required the bondage or expulsion 
of every mulatto child. 

2. Selling persons convicted of crimes. Among the Romans, 
persons convicted of certain offences were sold as slaves, and their 
posterity after them were doomed to bondage. Similar laws for 
converting free negroes and mulattoes into slaves are in force in 
several of our States. Thus, in South Carolina, if a free negro 
" entertains a runaway slave," he forfeits ten pounds ; and if, as 
must generally be the case, he cannot pay the fine, he is sold. In 
1S27, a free woman and her two children were converted into 
slaves under this law, for sheltering two fugitive slave children ! 

3. Debtors sold by their creditors. By a law of the late territory 
of Florida, approved by Congress (!), when a judgment obtained 
against a free colored person, shall remain unsatisfied for five days, 
such person shall be sold to raise money to pay the judgment. The 
sale was nominally for a term of years, but practically for life. 

4. Suspected fugitives were sold as slaves. This Roman device 
for procuring slaves is now in operation in the District of Columbia, 
under the immediate sanction of Congress, and in almost every slave 
State. The process is simple : A man who it is deemed ought 
to be a slave, is arrested on suspicion of being a runaway, and thrown 
into prison ; notice is then given in a newspaper to his supposed 
master, to come and claim him. If claimed, well — if not, the prison- 
er is sold as a slave for life, to raise money to pay the expense of 
his imprisonment. 

Having obtained some insight into Roman slavery, as it existed 
in the time of Christ and his Apostles, and with their acquiescence, 
let us next look at " Slavery as it exists at the present day," and 
which the Bishop of Texas, with the concurrence of the Bishops of 
North and South Carolina, assures us " is agreeable to the order 
of Divine Providence." 

What is American Slavery 1 Its advocates are fond of hiding its 
vileness under false definitions. It is not servitude — it is not com- 



14 

pulsory labor — it is not arbitrary authority — it is not cruelty — it is 
not injustice — it is not oppression. These are, indeed, the usual 
accidents of slavery ; but they do not constitute it, and are daily, 
one and all, found in total separation from it. Slavery is the con- 
version of a rational, accountable, immortal being, made in the 
image of God and a little lower than the Angels, and for whom 
Christ died, into a chattel, an article of property, a vendible com- 
modity.* It is not the violation of certain rights, but the annihila- 
tion of ALL."f It is the degradation of a man to the level of a brute. J 
Slavery involves the denial of all domestic relations, and conse- 
quently the refusal to afford them legal protection. § The infant 
slave may be sold or given away long before he sees the light, so 
that, at the instant of his birth, he belongs to one master and his 
mother to another. j| A slave can possess no property ;1T nor is any 

* " Slaves shall be deemed "sold, taken, reputed and adjudged in law to be 
chattels personal in the hands of their owners, and possessors, and their execu- 
tors and administrators, to all intents, constructions and purposes whatever." — 
Law of South Carolina. 

t " A slave is one who is in the power of his master to whom he belongs. 
The master may sell him, dispose of his person, his industry and his labor. 
He can do nothing, possess nothing, nor acquire anything but what belongs to 
his master." — Civil Code of Louisiana. 

J " In case the personal property of a ward shall consist of specific articles, 
such as slaves, working beasts, animals of any kind — the court, if it deem it 
advantageous for the ward, may at any time pass an order for the sale there- 
of." — Law of Maryland. 

§ " With the consent of their masters, slaves may marry, and their moral 
power to agree to such a contract or connection as that of marriage, cannot be 
doubted; but whilst in a state of slavery it cannot produce any civil effect, 
because slaves are deprived of all civil rights." — Judge Matthews of Louisiana ; 
Martin's Rep. VI, 550. 

"A slave is never prosecuted for bigamy, or petty treason for killing a 
husband being a slave, any more than admitted to an appeal for murder." — 
D. Dulamy, Attorney General of Maryland : 1 Md. Rep. 561. 

|| " The testator left his negro wench, Pen, to one daughter, and her future 
increase to another. The court decided the bequest to be good, and that all 
the children born of Pen, after the death of the testator, belonged to the sister 
of her mistress. Per Cur. He who is the absolute owner of a thing, owns 
all its faculties for profits or increase, as well as the thing itself. This is every 
day's practice ; and it is held that a man may grant the wool of a flock of 
sheep for years." — Little's Rep. Ill, 275. Kentucky, 1823. 

Tf A master made a devise to trustees, for the benefit of his slave Betsey 
and her children. Devise held to be void. Per Cur. " The condition of slaves 
in this country is analogous to that of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and 
not that of the feudal times. They are generally considered not as persons,but 



15 

promise to him, or agreements with him binding in law.* Being 
under the control of his master, he can have no legal right to at- 
tend the worship of his Maker. j" Like other chattels, he can 
obtain no legal redress for any injury, however grievous. J The 
master may indeed recover compensation from any one who damages 
or kills either his horse or his slave ;§ but the law refuses to notice 
any insult or outrage offered to male or female slaves, which does 
not lessen their price in the market|| The whole life of a slave is 

as things. They can be sold or transferred as goods or personal estate ; they 
are held to be pro nullis, pro mortuis. By the civil law, slaves could not take 
property by descent or purchase ; and I apprehend this to be the law of this 
country." — Dcss. Rep. IV., 266. South Carolina. 

* Application to enforce a contract between master and slave " Per Cur. In 
the case of Sawney vs. Carter, the court refused, on great consideration, to 
enforce a promise by a master to emancipate his slave, where the conditions of 
the promise had been partly complied with by the slave. The court proceeded 
on the principle, that it is not competent to a Court of Chancery to enforce a 
contract between master and slave, even although the contract should be fully 
complied with on the part of the slave." — Leigh's Rep. I, 72. Vig. 1829. 

t "150 free negroes and slaves, belonging to the African Church, were taken 
up on Sunday afternoon by the city guard, and lodged in the guard-house. 
The City Council yesterday morning sentenced five of them, consisting of a 
Bishop and four ministers, to one month's imprisonment, or to give security to 
leave the State. Eight other ministers were also sentenced separately to 
receive ten lashes, or pay a fine each of five dollars." — Charleston Patriot, 1818. 

Those whose punishment is here recorded were free negroes ; and from their 
fate, we may judge of the religious privileges of the slaves. 

J " It would be an idle form and ceremony to make a slave a party to a suit, 
by the instrumentality of which he could recover nothing; or if a recovery 
could be had, the instant it was recovered, would belong to the master. The 
slave can possess nothing, he can hold nothing. He is, therefore, not a compe- 
tent party to a suit." — Wheeler's Treatise on the Law of Slavery, p. 197. 

§ " Trespass for killing Plaintiff's slave. It appeared the slave was stealing 
potatoes from a bank near Defendant's House. The Defendant fired upon him 
with a gun loaded with buck-shot, and killed him. The jury found a verdict 
for Plaintiff for One Dollar. Motion for new trial. The court hold there must 
be a new trial; that the jury ought to have given the Plaintiff the value of the 
slave. That if the jury were of opinion the slave was of bad character, some 
deduction from the usual price ought to be made; but the Plaintiff was cer- 
tainly entitled to his actual damage for killing his slave. Where property is 
in question, the value of the article, as nearly as can be ascertained, furnishes a 
rule from which they are not at liberty to depart." — M 1 Cord's Rep. IV, 156. 
South Carolina, 1827. 

|| " There must be a loss of service, or at least a diminution of the faculty 
of the slave for bodily labor, to warrant an action by the master." — Harris tp 
Johnson's Rep. I., 4. Maryland. 



16 

appropriated by the master, and no portion of it belongs to himself, 
to be occupied in promoting his own happiness, or that of his 
offspring.* 

* " The Defendant was indicted for an assault and battery upon Lydia, the 
slave of one Elizabeth Jones. On the trial, it appeared that the Defendant 
had hired the slave for a year ; that during the term, the slave had committed 
some small offence, for which the Defendant undertook to chastise her ; that 
while in the act of so doing, the slave ran off, whereupon the Defendant called 
upon her to stop, which being refused, he shot at and wounded her. The 
Defendant was found guilty, and appealed. Per Cur. Ruffin, J. The inquiry 
here is, whether a cruel and unreasonable battery on a slave by the hirer is 
indictable? ... In criminal proceedings, and indeed in reference to all 
other persons but the general owner, the hirer and possessor of a slave, in 
relation to both rights and duties, is, for the time being, the owner. . . . 
Upon the general question whether the owner is answerable criminaliter for a 
battery upon his own slave, or other exercise of authority or force not forbidden 
by statute, the court entertains bat little doubt. That he is so liable has never 
been decided, nor, as far as is known, been hitherto contended. The established 
habits and uniform practice of the country, in this respect, are the best evidence 
of the portion of power deemed by the whole community requisite to the pre- 
servation of the master's dominion. This has, indeed, been assimilated at the bar 
to the other domestic relations, and arguments drawn from the well established 
principles which confer and restrain the authority of the parent over the child, 
the tutor over the pupil, the master over the apprentice, have been pressed on 
us. The court does not recognize their application. There is no likeness 
between the cases. They are in opposition to each other, and there is an im- 
passable gulph between them. The difference is that which exists between 
freedom and slavery ; and a greater cannot be imagined. In the one, the end 
in view is the happiness of the youth, born to equal rights with the governor 
on whom devolves the duty of training the young to usefulness, in a station 
which he is hereafter to assume among freemen. To such an end, and with 
such a subject, moral and intellectual instruction seem the natural means, 
and for the most part, they are found to suffice ; moderate force is only super- 
added to make the others effectual ? If that fail, it is better to leave the party 
to his own headstrong passions and the ultimate correction of the law, than to 
allow it to be immoderately inflicted by a private person. With slavery it is 
far otherwise. The end is the profit of the master, his security and the public 
peace. The subject is one doomed in his own person and in his posterity, to live 
without knowledge, and without capacity to make anything his own, and to toil that 
others may reap the fruits. 

" What moral considerations shall be addressed to such a being to convince 
him, what it is impossible but that the most stupid must feel and know can 
never be true, that he is thus to labor upon a piinciple of natural duty, or for 
the sake of his own personal happiness ? Such services can only be expected 
from one who has no will of his own, who surrenders his will in explicit 
obedience to that of another. Such obedience is the consequence only of 
uncontrolled authority over the body. There is nothing else which can operate 



17 

Such is American Slavery, not as abused by the cruel and the 
lawless, but as established by legislative enactments and maintained 
by judicial decisions. Such is the Slavery which George W. Free- 
man, as minister of the Most High God, declares to be " agreeable to 
the order of Divine Providence." 

Such is the Slavery, to the defence of which in God's house, on 
His holy day, the Right Rev. Father in God, Levi S. Ives, listened 
with " most unfeigned pleasure." Such is the Slavery, whose vin- 
dication the Churchmen of South Carolina spread on the wings of 
the wind, for " the advancement of Christianity." And shall there 
not be a woe now, as in ancient times, " unto them that call evil 
good, and good evil, that put darkness for light, and light for dark- 
ness ; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter ?" The guilt 
of such clerical champions of Slavery as Bishops Ives and Freeman, 
is tremendously aggravated by their personal knowledge of its unut- 
terable abominations. The decision of Judge Ruffin, quoted in the 
notes, was delivered in Bishop Ives' Diocese, and in which Free- 
man delivered his notorious sermons. Only five days after the lat- 
ter had declared from the pulpit of Raleigh, that " Slavery as it 
exists at the present day is agreeable to the order of Divine Provi- 
dence," the following comment appeared in the Newbern (N. C.) 
Spectator : 

" $200 Reward. — Ran away from the subscriber about three years 
ago, a certain negro man named Ben, commonly known by the 
name of Ben Fox. He had but one eye. Also, one other negro 
by the name of Rigdon, who ran away on the Sth of this month. I 
will give the reward of one hundred dollars for each of the above 
negroes, to be delivered to me, or confined in the Jail of Lenoir or 
Jones County, or for the killing of them, so that I can see 
them. W. D. COBB." 

to produce the effect. The power of the master must be absolute, to render 
the submission of the slave perfect. I most freely confess my sense of the 
harshness of this proposition. I feel it as deeply as any man can. And as a 
principle of moral right, every person in his retirement must repudiate it. But in the 
actual condition of things, it must be so. There is no remedy. This disci- 
pline belongs to Slavery." — The State vs. Mann, Dev. Rep.; p s 263, 
North Carolina, 1829. 

And so it was decided, that a master or his locum tenens may, with legal im- 
punity, shoot a woman if she will not stand still to be flogged ! It is pleas- 
ing to see that this judge, while upholding the essential discipline of slavery, 
is too honest to wait for a new revelation from Heaven to pronounceit wrong ; 
and they who profess to believe it right, insult the moral sense of mankind, 
and lie to their own consciences. 
2 



18 

And now does the reader imagine Mr. Cobb some horrible 
wretch, who thus publicly offers money for the blood of the inno- 
cent, for even Judge Ruffin admits that no principle of natural duty 
requires the slave to toil for his master ! Mr. Cobb may be a 
very reputable churchwarden, vestryman, or communicant of the 
Church in Newbern. He is a law-abiding citizen, and has acted in 
strict accordance with " Slavery as it exists at the present day," 
and of course " agreeably with the order of Divine Providence." 
Before he thus compassed the death of two of his fellow-men, he 
obtained, and published in the same paper with his advertisement, 
the following proclamation, viz : 

" We do hereby, by virtue of an Act of the Assembly of this 
State, concerning Servants and Slaves, intimate and declare if the 
said Slaves (Ben and Rigdon) do not surrender themselves, and re- 
turn home immediately after the publication of these presents, that 
any person may kill and destroy said Slaves, by such means as he 
or they may think jit, without accusation or impeachment of any 
crime for so doing, or without incurring any penalty or forfeiture 
thereby. 

" Given under our hands and seals, this 12 November, 1S36. 

B. COLEMAN, J. P. 
JAS. JONES, J. P." 

It may, indeed, be said that this proclamation of the two Justices 
of the Peace is an idle mockery, first, because the slaves are by 
law incapacitated from reading it. and secondly, because it assigns no 
time for their return, and of course, that they might legally be 
flayed alive an hour after the proclamation was issued. But what 
is all this to Mr. Cobb ? He has strictly pursued the course pointed 
out by law for murdering slaves in Bishop Ives' Diocese. 

Again, the Wilmington (same Diocese) Advertiser of ]3th July, 
1838, has the following: 

" Run away, my negro man Richard. A reward of $25 will be 
paid for his apprehension, dead or alive. Satisfactory proof will 
only be required of his being killed. 

DURANT H. RHODES." 

Mr. Rhodes, it must be admitted, is more confiding in human na- 
ture than Mr. Cobb. The latter would only pay his money, after 
beholding with his own eyes the dead bodies of his slaves ; 
whereas, Mr. Rhodes is contented with satisfactory proof that his 
man Richard has been slaughtered. 

We will give one more instance of the taste, feelings and moral- 
alily, springing from Slavery in the Bishop's Diocese, extracted 



19 

from the North Carolina Standard of July 18, 183S, published at 
Raleigh, the residence of the Bishop, and very probably honored by 
his constant perusal. 

" Twenty Dollars Reward. — Ran away from the subscriber, 
a negro woman and two children. The woman is tall and black, 
and a few days before she went off, I burnt her with a hot iron on 
the left side of her face, I tried to make the letter M, and she kept a 
cloth over head and face, and a fly bonnet on her head, so as to 
cover the burn. Her children, &c. 

MICAJAH RICKS." 

It is utterly impossible that the Southern clergy, in pleading for 
the continuance of Slavery, should not be conscious that they are 
pleading for the continued ignorance, wretchedness and heathenism 
of millions of their fellow-men.* 

Of the necessary heathenism of Slavery, little need be said. 
There may indeed be slaves who are Christians, but they are ex- 
traordinary exceptions from the system. Can Christianity take root 
and flourish where every religious privilege depends on the will of 
an arbitrary and often Godless master ; where the conjugal and pa- 
rental relations are unacknowledged, and in practice unrespected ; 
where the avenues to knowledge are closed, and ignorance en- 
forced, and where the very ministers of Christ are justly regarded 
by the slaves as in league with their oppressors 1 It is, moreover, 
utterly impossible that competent religious instruction can be afford- 
ed to the slaves, without at the same time imparting to them suffi- 
cient intelligence to endanger the whole system. Give to the 
slaves the means of becoming Christians, and you render them both 
useless and formidable to their masters. What ! shall a slave be 
enabled to contemplate the mysteries of redemption, and yet not un- 
derstand the iniquity of his own bondage ? Shall his heart glow 
with love for his Saviour, and yet shall he be made to believe that 
that Saviour approves the cruelty and injustice of which he is daily 
the victim ? Shall he be taught, as Bishop Freeman advises, to 
say the ten commandments, and not perceive that nearly the whole 
decalogue is violated in his own person ? The Bishop says h> 

* De Tocqueville -describes the Slave code as " Legislation stained by un- 
paralleled atrocities ; a despotism directed against the human mind. Legis- 
lation which forbids the Slaves to be taught to read or write ; and which aims 
to sink them as nearly as possible to the level of the brutes." But De Toc- 
queville is a French Philosophe. We are not aware that any minister of the 
Church, in the Slave States, has declared this legislation to be sinful. 



20 

must also learn his catechism. If he understands it, with what 
bitter scorn will he repeat, that it is his duty " not to covet or desire 
other men's goods, but to learn and labor truly to get his own 
living," recollecting that he is himself robbed, and with the consent 
and approbation of his spiritual teacher, of every product of his 
own labor, and that the only possible means whereby he can get 
his own. living, is by escaping from the house of bondage ?* 

One of the " duties of slaveholders " is to have slave children 
baptized. It is to be hoped, for the sake of decency, that the ad- 
dress to sponsors will on such occasions be omitted, as it would be 
trifling with sacred things to tell the chattel parents or friends, that 
they must call upon the child as he grows up to hear sermons, and 
take care that he be brought to the Bishop for confirmation ; since 
if either the sponsors or the child attempt to leave the plantation 
without their master's permission, they may legally be shot, and will 
certainly be scourged. It is, moreover, scarcely reverent to assure 
these sponsors, to whom the Word of God is a sealed book, and 
who have, and can have nothing of their own, that it is their duty 
to provide that the little article of merchandise be taught " all 
which a Christian ought to know and believe to his soul's health." 

Bishop Freeman is prudently silent on the subject of slave mar- 
riages. Surely a minister of the Church must have a front of 
bronze to use " the form of matrimony " in connecting two slaves. 
To make persons who are vendible commodities, and who can never 
spend an hour together without the permission of one, and often of 
two masters, vow, in the presence of Almighty God, to cleave to each 
other in riches and in poverty, in sickness and in health, till parted by 

* For these or other reasons, Bishop Ives has himself constructed a cate- 
chism, whose admirable qualities he thus describes : " The plainness of its 
directions enables any person to apply it. If our planters, therefore, under a 
sense of their solemn responsibility to God for the Christian instruction of 
their slaves, would adopt it, and see to its faithful inculcation, the next genera- 
tion of blacks in our State, at a very small expense, would sufficiently under- 
stand the truth as it is in Jesus, without knowing a letter of the al- 
phabet." — Spirit of Missions, Nov., 1842. 

There are in the Bishop's diocese, as appears by the last census, 209,783 
free white persons over 20 years of age. Of these, 56,609, or nearly one-third, 
cannot read or write. Hence, the next generation of whites in North Carolina 
may be equally indebted with the blacks, to this catechism, for their know- 
ledge of the truth as it is in Jesus. And yet there may be doubts of the 
efficiency of this labor-saving machine, seeing it is to be applied by slave- 
holders, so many of whom do not themselves know a letter of the alphabet. 



21 

death, is but solemn mockery. The priestly prohibition, " Those 
whom God hath joined together, let not man put asunder," is, more- 
over, not merely in utter contempt of the laws of the land, but at 
war with the very existence of Slavery. If the husband and wife 
may not be separated at the will of their owners, and according to 
the state of the market, what becomes of property in man 1 

As the House of Bishops, in their selection of Dr. Freeman, gave 
their implied sanction to American slavery, it might be well for 
them in their next pastoral letter to determine how far, and under 
what circumstances, the Church allows a slave a plurality of 
wives. This is the more necessary, as the " sects " are beginning 
to legislate upon the subject, since the civil power in this particular 
gives him unbounded liberty. A Reverend Professor of the Metho- 
dist Church has decided that it is perfectly lawful for an owner to 
separate husband and wife, and that if there be any sin in the case, it 
rests upon the shoulders of the slaves, who ought not to have taken 
vows which their condition disqualifies them from keeping. A 
Baptist association in Virginia have granted permission to a slave 
member to take a second wife, his first having been sold into an- 
other part of the country ; and another association in Georgia is re- 
ported to have voted, that a separation of man and wife, by sale or 
hire, to such a distance as precludes personal intercourse, is con- 
sidered by God as equivalent to death.* 

One of the blessed objects for which God instituted marriage, was 
the care and instruction of the young ; and hence the injunction, 
" Parents, bring up your children in the nurture and admonition of 
the Lord." Eut slave children, as we have seen, may be sold or 
given away before their birth, and are the subjects of traffic at an 
early a°-e. For this and other reasons, the religious education of 
slaves is, with rare exceptions, wholly out of the question. On the 
whole, Slavery and Heathenism are, in the general, indissolubly con- 
nected ; and Jesus Christ, in approving of the one, consented that 
millions for whom he died should become the victims of the 
other ! 

Of the rights of property, none are more obvious and indisputable 
than that of buying and selling. Hence the advocates of the Afri- 

* Professor E. A. Andrews, in his letter on " Slavery and the Domestic 
Slave-trade," relates that a slave complaining to him that his wife's master 
was about selling her, remarked, " This is, my third wife, both the others were 
sold to the speculators." 



22 

can slave-trade in the British Parliament most consistently rested 
the justification of the commerce on the righteousness of Slavery 
itself. Not a clerical champion of " Slavery as it exists at present," 
questions the moral right 

'• To gauge and span, ' 
" And buy the muscles and the bones of man." 

And now we call upon our Bishops, either to disabuse the public 
mind as to the alleged iniquity of the African slave-trade, or else to 
show from Scripture, that while it is very wicked to buy a savage 
in Africa and sell him in Cuba, it is a lawful act to buy a fellow- 
countryman, and possibly a fellow-christian in North Carolina, and 
sell him in New Orleans.* 

* Bishop Ives' diocese is one of the great breeding districts in which human 
cattle are raised for the Southern market. As a specimen of the style in 
which the correspondence of gentlemen engaged in this commerce is con- 
ducted, we give a letter from a North Carolina merchant to his consignee, a* 
New Orleans : 

" Halifax, N. C, Nov. 16, 1839. 
Dear Sir — I have shipped in the brig Addison — prices are below — 
No. 1. Caroline Ennis. - - - $650. 
" 2. Silvy Holland, .... 625. 
" 3. Silvy Booth, - 487 50. 

" 4. Maria Pollock, - 475. 

" 5. Emeline Pollock, - - - 475. 

" 6. Delia Averit, .... 475. 
The two girls that cost $650 and $625, were bought before I shipped my 
first. I have a great many negroes offered to me, but I will not pay the prices 
they ask, for I know they will come down. I have no opposition in market. 
I will wait until I hear from you before I buy, and then I can judge what I 
must pay. Goodwin will send you the bill of lading for my negroes, as he 
shipped them with his own. Write often, as the times are critical, and it de- 
pends on the prices you get, to govern me in buying. Yours, &c. 

Mr. Theophilus Freeman, ) G. W. Barnes." 

New Orleans. ( 

The above was a small but choice invoice of wives and mothers. Nine 
days before, viz., 7th Nov., Mr. Barnes advised Mr. Freeman of having shipped 
a lot of 43 men and women. Mr. Freeman, informing one of his correspon- 
dents of the state of the market, writes {Sunday, 21st Sept., 1839), " I bought a 
boy yesterday 16 years old, and likely, iveighing 110 pounds, at $700. 1 sold a 
likely girl, 12 years old, at $500. I bought a man yesterday, 20 years old, six 
feet high, at $820 ; one to-day, 24 years old, at $850, black and sleek as a mole." 

And are these brokers in human flesh, these butchers of human hearts, bad 
men ? For aught that appears, they are as sound Churchmen, and as heaven- 
ly-minded Christians, except in trading in negroes on Sunday, as Bishops Ives 
and Freeman themselves ; they are but reducing to practice the doctrines 
taught by these Right Rev. Fathers. If Slavery be right, we must indeed 
wait for a new revelation before we pronounce the slave-trade wrong. No 



23 

Again, as God approved of the bondage of white men, would it 
not be a laudable enterprise to enlarge the assortments in our slave- 
markets, by the importation of Russian serfs 1 If the reduction of 
millions of the human race to the condition of mere chattels be con- 
sistent with the will of God, then, inasmuch as the greater includes 
the less, who shall say that every minor form of oppression is not 
equally agreeable to the common Father of mankind 1 

" Slavery," says Wilberforce, is " a system of the grossest in- 
justice, of the most heathenish irreligion and immorality, of the 
most unprecedented degradation and unrelenting cruelty." Yet of 
this system the Episcopal Church is a mighty buttress, and certain 
of her Bishops its reckless and unblushing champions. But could 
the united logic and eloquence of the whole House of Bishops per- 
suade the mother, as she bends with delight over the infant cherub 
in the cradle, that the compassionate Redeemer, who took little 
children into his arms and blessed them, has given his consent that 
the child of her love, the object of her hopes and prayers, should 
be torn from her embraces, and sold in the market to the highest 
bidder, to put money in the pocket'of another 1* Let the experi- 
ment be made, and if that mother be a Christian, she will thank 
God that she knows and loves her Saviour too well to believe such 
a blasphemy. 

And by what process do our masters in Israel justify American 
Slavery \ Do they show its accordance with the divine attributes — 
with the spirit of the Gospel — with the cultivation of holiness — 

doubt the trade occasions painful separations, but the rights of property are 
paramount to the feelings of nature. The Presbyterian Synod of Kentucky, 
some time since, published an address, in which they thus noticed the domes- 
tic slave-trade : " The members of a slave family may (by law) be forcibly 
separated, so that they shall never more meet again till the final judgment. 
And cupidity often induces the masters to practise what the law allows- 
Brothers and sisters, parents and children, husbands and wives, are torn asun- 
der, and permitted to see each other no more. These acts are daily occurring in 
the midst of us. There is not a neighborhood where these heart-rending 
scenes are not displayed. There is not a village or road that does not behold 
the sad procession of manacled outcasts, where chains and mournful counte- 
nances tell that they are exiled by force from all that their hearts hold dear." 
And the Synod speak of the iniquity of the system ! But why is it more ini- 
quitous to fetter slaves than any other animals that we send to market ? 
Why more cruel to separate a child than a calf from its mother? 

* Benjamin Davis, a slave-trader in Hamburg, S. C, advertised in the 
Charleston papers, for sale, " small boys without their mothers." 



24 

with the glory of God — with individual happiness and national 
prosperity 1 Oh, no — they appeal to Hebrew servitude, and to a 
few insulated texts in the New Testament. 

There is something appalling in the passionate eagerness with 
which certain ministers of Christ rush forward to lay the blessed 
Scriptures upon the altar of the southern Moloch. We wish to 
do these men no injustice, and therefore frankly admit, that some 
persons may honestly find themselves embarrassed in their endeavors 
to reconcile certain texts with the obvious cruelty and injustice of 
human bondage ; and we as frankly confess that we shudder at 
the very idea of one who professes himself called by the Holy 
Ghost as a preacher of righteousness, teaching his people that Ame- 
rican Slavery, Slavery as it exists in North Carolina, is not "wrong." 

The moral sense of every man, when not perverted by pecuniary 
interest, education, or authority, is itself sufficient to convince him 
of the iniquity of Slavery. The Christian student, therefore, who 
commences the Scriptural examination of this subject with an un- 
clouded judgment, will come to his work with a firm conviction, 
that every attribute of Slavery is opposed to the spirit of the Gospel. 
Hence, he would be restrained from promptly pronouncing Slavery 
unscriptural only by a painful suspicion that certain passages in the 
Bible lent it their sanction. He would, however, call to mind that 
there were some things in Scripture confessedly " hard to be under- 
stood," and he would cherish the hope that he did not rightly un- 
derstand those which apparently contradicted the character of God 
and the generaFprecepts of His Word. He would, therefore, search 
the Scriptures, not to find a w r arrant for Slavery, but to reconcile 
certain obscure texts with the love and holiness which beam from 
every page. 

If the Patriarchs did, indeed, as is said, hold slaves, he would 
recollect that they also indulged in polygamy, and were, in several 
instances, guilty of falsehood.* 

* It is not our purpose to enter at large into the Bible argument, but merely 
to suggest some reasons why they who think American Slavery "wrong," 
are not necessarily impugners of " Revelation." It might be inferred from the 
confidence and evident delight with which the example of Abraham is urged 
in vindication of our " domestic institution," that the Father of the faithful 
was also the Father of all who traffic in human flesh. If he was, indeed, a 
slaveholder, he was still veiy far from being the type of a Southern planter. 
While childless, he designated one of his slaves as his future heir. He was 
afterwards prevented, only by Divine appointment, from making the son of the 



25 

If the Jews were, indeed, allowed to buy slaves of the heathens 
around them, we must recollect that they were also allowed, nay, 
even commanded to destroy the inhabitants of Canaan, men, women 
and children ; and Slavery was but a commutation of the punish- 
ment of death to which God had sentenced them for their sins. 
Such examples are not precedents for us under the Gospel dispen- 

bondwoman heir with the son by promise, and was consoled by the assurance that 
the former should become the father of princes, and the founder of a great na- 
tion. He moreover entrusted to one of his slaves, the selection of a wife for 
his favorite son. The 318 servants " born in his house," the Bishop of Texas 
asserts were " slaves." Still they were men whom he armed and led to battle. 
They, with their parents, brothers, sisters, wives and children, must have 
formed a " gang " of about 2000 in number. Yet we find the master of this 
multitude of slaves leaving his guests to catch a calf to provide dinner for 
them, while the mistress of this goodly household occupied herself in knead- 
ing and baking cakes for her company ! A pro-slavery theory can alone blind 
us to the evidence afforded by these facts; that Abraham was the chief of a 
clan or tribe, and that the expression, " born in his own house," only indicates 
that the 318 were not strangers whom he employed on the occasion, but mem- 
bers of the community acknowledging him as its head. 

That there was a species of servitude in the East at an early period, as at 
present, is true ; it is also true that it was of a very different character from 
that which prevailed in the West. . Our Slavery belongs to the Western sys- 
tem. In a late work on Egypt by Clot Bey the distinction between the two 
systems is thus noticed : " There is a prodigious difference between American 
Slavery, and servitude among the Orientals. With them, the institution is 
neither cruel or disgraceful. It does not regard the Slave as a thing, a material 
object, as did the Roman law. It does not make him a mere article of import 
or export, a matter of speculation, a simple machine, in fact, whose efficiency is 
estimated as horse power. The West Indian regards in the negro only his cor- 
poreal value, and forgets in him the intellectual man ; he robs him of his na- 
ture. The Mussulman, on the contrary, always beholds a man in his Slave 
and treats him in such a manner, that we may say of Oriental Slavery, that it 
is often a real adoption, and always an admission into an extended family 
circle. 

" Oriental servitude honorably contrasts with our Slavery, and above all by 
its respect for the dignity of human nature. The slave, in Turkey, is not 
humiliated by his condition : he often proudly boasts that he is of the family 
of such a Bey, or such a Pasha, and gives his master the title of father. He 
knows, moreover, that he is not bound for ever to his station by a chain of 
iron. He has before him examples sufficient to raise his ambition, and to 
swell his soul with the hope of more brilliant destinies." The author then give 
various instances of slaves who had risen to high dignities ; and mentions two 
sons-in-law of the present Sultan, who had both been slaves, and adds, " In 
Egypt, the superior officers are, for the most part, manumitted slaves." See 
Apercu general sur L'Egypte, par A. B. Clot Bey, 1840. Tom. i., p. 269. 



26 

sation without a special warrant. But is it certain that the " bond- 
men " (so called by our translators, but not distinguished in the 
original from servants*) were Slaves'? If so, they were the property 
of their masters. Now, how was their property acquired ? The 
heathen around, even their very infants, might be slaughtered, but 
" He that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his 
hand, he shall surely be put to death." Hence the Jewish slaves 
were to be purchased, but of whom ? If the slave-trade constituted 
a part of the Jewish commerce, strange it is that we hear nothing 
of the slave market in Israel. We know that the Jews sold them- 
selves. " If a sojourner or stranger wax rich by thee, and thy 
brother that dwelleth by him wax poor, and sell himself unto the 
stranger or sojourner by thee," &c. Hence it is possible that as 
poor Jews sold themselves to rich strangers, poor strangers might 
sell themselves to rich Jews. There is no evidence that the hea- 
then in Palestine had slaves to sell, but many among them might 
find it convenient to enter into Jewish families as domestics. The 
servitude of both Jewish and heathen servants seems to have been 
limited to the year of Jubilee. That this servitude was not found- 
ed on the idea of property appears from the prohibition, " Thou 
shall not deliver unto his master, the servant which is escaped from 
his master to thee" (Deut. xxiii. 15). This law, whether the fugi- 
give was a Jew or a heathen, is utterly irreconcilable with common 
honesty, supposing the servant to have been a mere chattel ; and 
certainly belonged to a very different code of morals from that 
which enjoins, " If thou meet thy enemy's ox or his ass going as- 
tray, thou shall surely bring it back to him again." 

On turning to the New Testament, our inquirer would recol- 
lect, that it was written at a time, when, among the Romans, 
Slavery and the exhibitions of the amphitheatre were systems of 
extraordinary cruelty and of human butchery, and that although 
both are alluded to neither is expressly condemned. True it is, that 

* The word in the original, sometimes rendered bondman, and sometimes 
servant, is Obcd. It is applied to Christ, " Behold my servant whom I up- 
hold," Isaiah xxiv. 1. It is applied to King Rehoboam, 1 Kings xii. 7. Ziba, 
Saul's Obcd, had himself twenty Obeds,2 Samuel ix. 10. There is no word 
in Hebrew for slave, as distinct from servant. We find, 1 Chron. ii. 34, that 
Sheshan, the head of one of the families of the tribe of Judah, gave his daugh- 
ter to wife, to his servant, an Egyptian ; and so far was any disgrace attached 
in consequence to their children, that the son of this very daughter was en- 
rolled among " the valiant men " of David's army, 1 Chron. ii., 41. 



27 

St. Paul induced a servant to return to his master. If the servant 
was a freeman, the case proves nothing. If he was a slave, the 
Apostle required his instant manumission, by commanding the mas- 
ter to receive him, " Not now as a servant, but above a servant, 
a brother beloved ; receive him as myself.''''* 

There are instances in which persons, who perhaps held slaves, 
are spoken of with commendation, but not on that account. None 
of the Churches or individuals commended in the Apostolic epistles 
were faultless, and it would be most monstrous to infer from a gene- 
ral commendation, an Apostolic sanction of every error or sin of 
which they might be guilty. 

Were it possible to imagine a kind of Slavery divested of all sin- 
ful attributes, and consistent alike with the glory of God and the 
good of man, Bishops Freeman and Ives well know that such is 
not the character of American Slavery. If " Slavery as it exists at 
present," in the Dioceses of these two Bishops, is indeed accepta- 
ble to Him who proclaims himself, " The Lord, the Lord God, 
merciful and gracious, long suffering and abundant in goodness and 
truth," then, indeed, is the Bible a riddle, and its morality a para- 
dox. Be it so ; a title to negro slaves must at all hazards be found 
in the Bible. The very character of the Southern Priesthood for hon- 
esty, depends on its production. f What is wanting in proof, must 
be supplied by bold assertion, and all Christendom beyond the 
slave region shall be accused of presumption, for not waiting for 
a new revelation, before they dare to pronounce such slavery as ex- 
ists in North Carolina wrong ! 

And shall we be any longer insulted with the assertion, that the 
preached Gospel is the divinely appointed means of abolishing 
Slavery ? Most certain it is, that the spirit of the Gospel, carried 
into universal practice, would relieve the human family from every 
moral evil with which it is afflicted ; but it is utterly false that the 
ministrations of our own, or any other Church, will correct a single 
vice, independent of the character of its ministers, the examples 
they set, and the doctrines they preach. Would the teachings of 

* St. Paul wrote by Onesimus to the Church at Colosse, and in his Epistle 
speaks of him as " a faithful and beloved brother, who is one of you," Col 
iv. 9. 

t The clergy of the South, of all denomination, are generally slaveholders. 
A member of the House of Bishops is said, in a late western newspaper, to 
own 170 slaves. 



28 

a thousand Dr. Freemans loosen the fetters of a single slave ? No 
less than forty missionaries are supported by our Board of Missions 
in the slave regions. Dare we hope they have induced one master 
to let his bondmen go free ? While the Southern clergy vindicate 
Slavery as a Christian institution, they are in danger of producing 
a result which they as little expect as desire. " Should the priest- 
hood," says a Southern writer, once himself a slaveholder, "should 
the priesthood succeed in convincing the world that Slavery is the 
doctrine of the New Testament, then will infidelity become the 
true religion of mankind — and not till then." Says another South- 
ern writer, and apparently a pious Christian, " I distinctly avow, 
that when I can be brought to believe that American Slavery, taken 
as a system, is sustained by the teachings of Holy Writ, I must 
cease to be a believer in the Bible." 

But, blessed be God ! his priesthood has, in all ages of the 
Church, afforded the most glorious illustrations of fearless, devotion 
to duty, and of self-denying benevolence, that the world has ever 
witnessed. While some have claimed to lipid their slaves as mo- 
narchs their crowns, " by the grace of God," many have witnessed 
a good confession against human bondage. In the Church of Eng- 
land at the present day, there is not probably a Bishop, Priest, or 
Deacon, who would endorse the theology of our Texan Bishop. 
But then we are told by the slaveholders, and their tools, the North- 
ern demagogues, that England is anti-slavery through envy of our 
prosperity ! Let us, then, hear the English Bishops, when such a 
motive could have no existence. 

Bishop Warburton, in a sermon preached in 1776 against 
Slavery and the slave-trade, exclaims, " Gracious God ! to talk, as 
in herds of cattle, of property in rational creatures — creatures en- 
dowed with all our faculties, possessing all our qualities but that of 
color — our brethren both by nature and grace, shocks all the feel- 
ings of humanity and the dictates of common sense. Nature cre- 
ated man free, and grace invites him to assert his freedom." 

Bishop Burgess, in a pamphlet against the slave-trade, 17S9, 
says : " Such oppression (W. I. Slavery) and such traffic must be 
swept away at one blow. Such horrid offences against God and 
nature can admit of no medium. If no British subject is exempt 
from the duty of doing everything in his place towards preventing 
the continuance of so great a political as well as moral evil, more 
especially are not those subjects, whose business it is to teach what 



29 

is every man's concern to know, the interpreters of God's Word, 
which is so frequently violated by West India Slavery and its con- 
sequences." 

Bishop Porteus declared in the House of Lords, 1806, in an- 
swering certain Scriptural arguments in behalf of Slavery, " There 
was no such thing as perpetual slavery under the Old or New Tes- 
tament ;" and he showed that all Hebrew servants were set at 
liberty every seventh year, and all others at the Jubilee. 

The Bishop of St. Asaph, the same year, asserted in the House 
of Lords, that " the principle of perpetual slavery is totally incon- 
sistent with the Jewish law. When we come down to Chris- 
tianity, we find dealers in slaves are held among the worst of the 
human race. St. Paul, in his Epistle to Timothy, tells us what 
the dealers in slaves are, and who are their companions. The 
slave-dealers are called ' stealers of men,' and their companions are 
liars, perjurers, murderers, and parricides." 

Bishop Horsely, in 1799, with Christian boldness, rebuked the 
nobles of Britain for their wicked toleration of the slave-trade ■ 
and vindicated the Gospel of Christ from the aspersions of those 
who represented it as a shield for cruelty and injustice. After 
showing that the " men-stealers " classed in the Bible with murderers 
of fathers and of mothers, were in fact, according to the true mean- 
ing of the Greek word, " slave-traders," he proceeded : " We have 
reason to conclude, from the mention of 'slave-traders' by St. 
Paul, that if any of them should ever find their way to Heaven, 
they must go thither in company with murderers and parricides. 
My Lords, I do certainly admit that there is no prohibition of 
Slavery in the Bible in explicit terms, such as these words, ' thou 
shalt not have a slave,' or ' thou shalt not hold any one in slavery.' 
There is no explicit reprobation of Slavery by name. My Lords, 
if I were to say there was no occasion for any such prohibition, be- 
cause Slavery is condemned by something anterior to either the 
Christian or the Mosaic dispensation, I could support the assertion 
by grave authorities. Beware, my Lords, how you are persuaded 
to bring under the opprobrious name of fanaticism the regard you 
owe to the great duties of justice and mercy, for the neglect of 
which, if you should neglect them, you will be answerable to that 
tribunal, where no prevarication of witnesses can misinform the 
Judge, where no subtilty of an advocate, miscalling the names of 



30 

things, and putting evil for good, and good for evil, can mislead the 
judgment." 

" Slavery," said Lord Mansfield, " is so odious that nothing but 
positive law can sustain it." His lordship little suspected that a 
time was approaching when the Church would afford it more effi- 
cient support than even positive law, and would herself look to it 
for support in return. One of our church periodicals has announced 
that " the Bishop of Georgia, in his Montpelier Institution, is test- 
ing the sufficiency of slave labor to support it." It is not unusual 
to see. in the Southern papers, notices of slaves to be sold on ac- 
count of ecclesiastical corporations. Bishop Wilberforce, in his 
History, refers to a proposal by the Editor of the " Spirit of Mis- 
sions " to establish a Mission School to be supported by slaves, 
who shall be induced, by the promise of prospective emancipation, 
to perform so much extra labor in the course of sixteen years as 
to yield a profit of one hundred per cent, on the capital invested, 
over and above the ordinary profits extorted by common taskmas- 
ters. This revolting scheme, in which it was intended that the 
slaves should work two hours before sunrise, and two hours after 
sunset, in all sixteen hours out of the four and twenty, and this for 
sixteen successive years, was pressed upon the Church in an official 
magazine, published in New York under the supervision of the Mis- 
sionary Committee, and by an Editor holding his appointment from 
the Board of Missions, including the Bishops, and other representa- 
tives of the Church elected by the General Convention. In about 
three months after this publication, the Board assembled, and writ- 
ten remonstrances were presented to them, beseeching them, for 
the honor of the Church, and the cause of religion and humanity, 
to disavow the conduct of their Editor. These remonstrances ex- 
cited warm debates, not unmingled with Southern arrogance. It 
was impossible for the Board to express disapprobation of the plan 
without indirectly censuring Bishops Ives and Elliott. If slaves be 
indeed property, what objection can there be to converting their 
bones and muscles into money for the Church ? To condemn the 
Editor, would offend the pro-slavery Bishops and Clergy ; expressly 
to approve his conduct, would raise a tempest at the North. So, 
policy was substituted for godly sincerity, and cunning for wisdom. 
The Board expunged from their minutes the proceedings had on 
the memorials, and avoiding all intelligible allusion to the scheme 
which had led to them, ordered the following words to be printed 



31 

on the future numbers of their own magazine : " It is to be under- 
stood by the readers of this periodical, that the Board of Missions 
are not responsible for the expression of editorial opinions, but sim- 
ply for the accuracy of facts connected with their operations." 

But lest even this extraordinary disclaimer should be supposed 
to involve a concealed censure on the late " editorial opinions," the 
resolution recommending it, and which was introduced by a Bishop 
from a slave State, as chairman of a committee, was preceded by 
another, declaring, " That, in the opinion of this Board, the Spirit of 
Missions has been conducted, during the year past, with commenda- 
ble diligence and ability ;" and the report of the committee accom- 
panying these resolutions is careful to state that the periodical in 
question is " gaining reputation and influence, and that if it con- 
tinues to be conducted with the same ability which it has of late ex- 
hibited, it will become a powerful auxiliary to the cause." 

The subject of Slavery had been brought directly and promi- 
nently before the Church, by her own appropriate officers. Money, 
entrusted to the Board for Missionary purposes, had been employed 
through the official magazine, to advocate the cause of human bon- 
dage, to condemn emancipation as " ruinous, and forbidden by 
common sense and Christian prudence," and to put in motion a 
machinery by which money was to be extorted for the coffers of the 
Church, from the cruel and extraordinary toil of miserable slaves. 
The memorialists had virtually asked the Rev. and Right Rev. 
Fathers of the Church, in council assembled, do, or do you not, 
approve of this conduct of your agent 1 To this interrogatory, the 
Rev. gentlemen thought it expedient to answer neither yes nor no ; 
but in the notice they ordered to be in future printed on their maga- 
zine, they did return a most disingenuous and unworthy reply. No 
human being ever supposed that the members of the Board, scat- 
tered throughout the Union, were responsible for the publication or 
"expression" in New York, of opinions of which they could have 
no previous knowledge, and of course no power to prevent. Did 
the Board intend to enunciate so bald a truism as this 1 As well 
might they have given notice that they were not responsible for any 
heresy or immorality of which their officers might hereafter be 
guilty. When examined with a critical microscope, the disclaimer 
has reference to the "expression" — the printing of opinions in New 
York. But in the plain, obvious, popular import of the notice, the 
disclaimer has reference to the opinions, after they are expressed and 



32 

printed. In this sense alone, had the disclaimer any reference to 
the subject which induced it. Nay, the Board intended it to be so 
understood ; for they thought proper to order a resolution to be 
sent to the memorialists, who had " complained of the tendency of 
an editorial article in the March number of the Spirit of Missions" 
(carefully avoiding mentioning in the minutes, the subject of the 
article), declaring that the Board had never " held itself responsible 
for the opinions expressed by the Editors of the Spirit of Missions," 
and had directed " this assertion of irresponsibility to be distinctly 
placed upon the cover of the future numbers of this periodical." 

On this assertion of " irresponsibility" we take issue, and affirm 
that the Board is responsible to the community, to the Church and 
to God, for the opinions of an Editor appointed by themselves, under 
their control, paid out of funds entrusted to their care, published in 
an official magazine, and printed at the expense of Missionary con- 
tributions. What ! will the Board tell us that their Editor may 
make their magazine a vehicle for the dissemination of obscenity and 
infidelity, and that it is no concern of theirs ? That he may dis- 
parage the Church, insult her Bishops, and deny her doctrines, and 
that they are not responsible ? But should he misdate a letter, or 
omit half a dollar in the acknowledgment of a donation, then, then 
indeed, they will not shrink from responsibility. 

Surely the Bishops who concurred in this " assertion of irre- 
sponsibility," forget for the moment their consecration vow, " to be 
ready with all faithful vigilance to drive away from the Church all 
strange and erroneous doctrines contrary to God's word." 

This disclaimer, like most cunning measures, was a sacrifice of 
duty to present expediency ; a sacrifice which, however common 
with politicians, we had no right to expect from such a body of 
men. The truth is, the Board were worried by the memorials. To 
take no notice of them would probably increase " agitation" — to 
approve the course of the Editor, would disgust many at the North 
— to condemn it, would offend all at the South. Instead of man- 
fully breaking down this triple hedge, within which they found 
themselves enclosed, they determined to crawl through it, and for 
this purpose, disencumbered themselves of a responsibility which 
God and the Church had commanded them to bear. 

Let us now turn to another, but a kindred, subject. Whatever 
may be the struggles of the slaveholder to wring from the Bible a 
title to his slaves, no reader of the volume of inspiration, whether 



33 

Christian or Infidel, has professed to discover in it a warrant for 
the establishment of caste in the Church of God. However much 
we may be inclined to appeal to the Scriptures for a license to 
despise, insult and oppress our fellow-Christians, on account of their 
race or natural features, we are effectually deterred by the declara- 
tions that one God hath created us — that we have all one Father — 
that in Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Gentile, Greek nor 
Barbarian, Bond nor Free ; and by the commands to do good unto 
all men, and to honor all men. Hence the institution of caste in 
the Church, and the obloquy, injustice and cruelty connected with 
it, are not rested, like slavery, on the alleged consent of Christ and 
his Apostles ; but simply and frankly on pecuniary interest, per- 
sonal antipathy, and popular prejudice. 

So accustomed have we been from childhood to the distinction of 
caste, arising from color — so universally is this distinction main- 
tained not merely in the Church, but in all the departments of 
society, that we have, for the most part, become callous to its ini- 
quity ; and our understandings can with difficulty be brought to 
believe that the merciful precepts of Christ's Gospel were intended 
to govern our intercourse with men of dark, as well as of white 
complexions. But although we may be insensible to the cruelty of 
caste, it is otherwise with its victims. 

The Rev. T. S. Wright, a liberally educated colored clergyman, 
thus briefly enumerates some of the consequences of that system, 
which our Church has been so active and zealous in maintaining. 

" No man can really understand this prejudice unless he feels it 
crushing him to dust, because it is matter of feeling. It has bolts, 
screws, and bars, wherever the colored man goes. It has bolts in 
all the schools and colleges. The colored parent, with the same 
soul as a white parent, sends his child to the seats of learning, and 
he finds the door bolted, and sits down to weep beside his boy. 
Prejudice stands at the door and bars him out. Does the child of 
the colored man show a talent for mechanics ? The heart of the 
parent beats with hope. He sees the children of the white man 
engaged in emploj-ment, and he trusts there is a door open for his 
boy to get an honest living, and become a useful member of society. 
But when he comes to the workshop with his child, he finds a bolt 
there. But even suppose he can get this first bolt removed, he 
finds other bars. Let him be ever so skilled as a mechanic, up 
.starts prejudice and says, 'I wont work in the shop, if you do.' 
3 



34 

Here he is scourged by prejudice, and has to go back and sink down 
to some of the employments which white men leave for the most 
degraded. He hears of the death of a child from home, and he goes 
in a stage or steamboat. His money is received, but he is scourged 
by prejudice. If he is sick, he can have no bed ; he is driven on 
deck. Money will not buy for him the comforts it gets for all who 
have not his complexion. He turns to some white friend, and he 
says, " submit, it is an ordinance of God, you must be humble.' I 
have felt this. As a minister, I have been called to pass often up 
and down the North River in steamboats. Many a night have I 
walked the deck, and not been able to lie down in a bed.* Preju- 
dice would, indeed, turn money to dross, where it was offered for 
these comforts by a colored man. Thus prejudice scourges us from 
the table, it scourges us from the cabin, from the stage-coach, and 
from the bed. Wherever we go, it has for us bolts, bars and rods. 
Even at the communion table, the colored man can only partake of 
the crumbs after the others have been served. This prejudice 
drives the colored man from religion. I have often heard my breth- 
ren say, they would have nothing to do with such a religion. They 
are driven away and go to infidelity ; for even the Infidels at Tam- 
many Hall make no distinction on account of color." 

That this prejudice may drive some of the sufferers into infidelity 
is probable ; since it has been a common mistake in all ages, to 
judge of Christianity, not by its own inspired records, but by the 
conduct of a portion of its fallible ministers. And he who is led to 
believe that American Slavery, and its detestable offspring, Ameri- 
can Caste, is approved of by Jesus Christ, may well be excused 
for questioning the divinity of his mission. 

Although caste had long existed among us in practice, the exclu- 
sion of Mr. Crummell from the General Theological Seminary was 
the first instance of its recognition, as a part of the ecclesiastical polity 
of the American Church. Mr. Degrass, the young man whose af- 
fecting journal is given by Bishop Wilberforce, was kept out of the 
Seminary by the personal influence and authority of Bishop Benjamin 
Onderdonk. But in Mr. Crummell, the Bishop found a more imprac- 
ticable subject, and a petition for admission was presented to the assem- 
bled Trustees. The statutes of the institution rendered it imperative 

* The writer has been informed, that the wife of Mr. Wright lost her life in 
consequence of exposure on the deck of a steamboat, being denied a berth in 
the cabin, on account of her complexion. 



35 

on the Trustees to admit all applicants possessing certain qualifica- 
tions, and these qualifications the Bishop honestly informed the 
board, were possessed by the present applicant. The Board, under 
these circumstances, found themselves in a dilemma. To reject the 
young man on account of his complexion would not only be illegal, 
but would excite remark, invite ridicule, and encourage " a°-ita- 
tion ;" and on the other hand, to admit him, would irritate a preju- 
dice which Bishop Onderdonk had admitted to Degrass was " un- 
righteous ;" and might also hazard the loss of Southern contributions 
to the Seminary. A committee, with Bishop Henry Onderdonk, of 
Pennsylvania^ chairman, was appointed to considerthe application ; 
and their report was more distinguished for brevity than for wis- 
dom. Without assigning a single reason, and without an allusion 
to the complexion of the applicant, they merely recommended 
" that the prayer of the Petitioner be not granted." The report was 
adopted, whereupon, Bishop Doane, of New Jersey, asked permis- 
sion, which was refused, to enter his objections on the minutes. 
Hence the minutes merely record the fact, that a Mr. Crummell had 
applied for admission into the Seminary and was denied. They 
afforded no intimation that the Trustees had violated the statutes, 
no hint that the rejected candidate was not colored like themselves. 
Should any one wonder why the application was rejected, the natu- 
ral presumption would be, that the young man was deficient in his 
literary attainments or moral character, and that the Committee who 
reported against him had benevolently refrained from putting his 
delinquencies upon record. But Mr. Crummell was a poor obscure 
colored man ; there was no probability that his case would excite 
inquiry, or ever be known. Certainly the management of the 
Trustees was exceedingly adroit. Alas ! for the wisdom of the 
wise, and the understanding of the prudent. In a short time the 
proceedings of the Board were exposed and condemned in the news- 
papers, not only of New York, but of London, and now form a con- 
spicuous and indelible portion of the " History of the Protestant 
Episcopal Church in America." The Bishop of New York thought 
it expedient to vindicate himself in a newspaper publication, in 
which he condescends to propitiate the " unrighteous prejudice" 
by a gratuitous sneer at amalgamation.^!). 

Mr. Crummell sought and obtained ordination in another Diocese, 
and then resolved to embrace an opportunity that offered, of organ- 
izing a colored Church in Philadelphia. He accordingly repaired 



36 

to that city, with the usual letter dismissory from his late Dio- 
cese, and in compliance with the Canon, presented it to the Bishop. 
We can readily believe that this last gentleman was not gratified 
at finding that the young man, who on his recommendation had been 
excluded from the Seminary, now claimed a canonical residence in 
his own Diocese, as a Brother Minister of the Church. The Can- 
ons allowed the Bishop no discretion. Mr. Crummell's letter was 
unexceptionable, and by the laws of the Church, he became en- 
titled, on its delivery, to all the rights and privileges of a Clergyman 
of the Diocese of Pennsylvania. But the Bishop was as indepen- 
dent of legal restraints in Philadelphia, as he had been in New 
York. He informed Mr. Crummell that he would receive his let- 
ter, only on the condition that he would pledge himself, in his own 
behalf, and in behalf of his Church, should he succeed in raising 
one, never to apply for a seat in Convention; and immediately pro* 
posed to write the pledge. He was told it was unnecessary, as the 
pledge could not be given. He then positively declared he would 
not receive him, on which the young minister intimated his inten- 
tion to return to the Diocese he had just left. Here again was an 
embarrassing dilemma. To disregard a dismissory letter from an- 
other Diocese, and to send back the bearer, without the slightest 
objection being made to his character or conduct, might lead to very 
inconvenient results, and would unquestionably cause much " agi- 
tation ;" and, on the other hand, to admit a negro to a canonical 
residence, was to open the door of the Convention to him, the con- 
sequence of which would be that a Minister of Christ, with a dark 
complexion, might sit in the Council of the Church ! The Bishop, 
to escape from this dilemma, proposed that he should inform the 
Convention in his address at its next meeting, that he had been ad- 
mitted with the understanding that he was to have no seat in it- 
Mr. Crummell, with the same high moral courage which had hither- 
to marked his course, replied that he could have no agency in the mat- 
ter. Thwarted in his attempts to make Mr. Crummell surrender 
his rights as a clergyman, the Bishop determined that others should 
wrest them from him ; and consented to receive the dismissory let- 
ter, telling him that he would get the Convention to take some order 
on the subject. 

About three weeks after this strange conference, the Convention 
of the Diocese assembled, and the Bishop's address contained the 
following passage : " In the Convention of 1795, it was declared 



37 

that the African Church of St. Thomas, in this city, was ' not en- 
titled to send a Clergyman or deputies to the Convention, or to in- 
terfere with the general government of the Church.' This law is 
still retained in our Sth Revised Regulations. The peculiar cir- 
cumstances which required this restriction may occur, and probably 
will, in other cases ; and I submit for your consideration whether it 
will not be proper to enact a similar restriction applicable to all 
clergymen and congregations in this Diocese under like circum- 
stances." 

It does really seem as if a consciousness of shame and guilt drives 
our ecclesiastical rulers, when perpetrating oppression and injustice 
upon colored Christians, to hide their meaning in unintelligible and 
deceptive phraseology. 

We here learn that in 1795, the Convention made a certain decla- 
ration, which to all appearance was judicial and not legislative, that 
a particular Church was not entitled to a representation in the Con- 
vention. The reasons for such a judgment are not given — they may 
have been good or bad, but the judgment itself was within the juris- 
diction of the Convention, since every Legislative body must judge 
of the qualifications of its members, although it cannot prescribe 
them. It does not appear that the Convention invaded any right, or 
did more than refuse to acknowledge an unlawful claim. 

And yet from the fact that the Church thus excluded was an Afri- 
can one, and from the omission of the reasons on which the judg- 
ment was founded, we have no question that the pretended declara- 
tion was a high-handed unconstitutional enactment, disfranchising a 
Rector and his congregation, solely on account of the tijncture of 
their skins ; and that the Convention were ashamed to place upon 
their minutes the unchristian motives by which they were tempted 
to trample under foot the constitutional rights of a minister of 
Christ, and the people under his charge. 

Bishop Onderdonk, we have seen, called on the Convention to 
enact a similar restriction, " applicable to all clergymen and con- 
gregations," which should hereafter be in " like circumstances.'''' 
What circumstances ? A state of schism, insubordination, or irre- 
gular or illegal incorporation \ Oh no, he meant having black skins, 
but was ashamed to say so. 

It will be observed that the legislation recommended is to be pros- 
pective, not ex post facto. No clergyman or congregation, now in 
the Diocese, is to be affected by it. No case now calls for this re- 



38 

striction, but cases " may occur, and probably will," and it is best 
to be prepared for contingencies. All this is painful. The Bishop, 
while uttering the words we have quoted, had in his possession the 
letter dismissory of the very clergyman against whom the proposed 
restriction was aimed ; and who, by his advice, had been shut out 
of the Theological Seminary, and from whom he had vainly endea- 
voured to obtain a disgraceful surrender of his rights as a Minister 
of the Church. Again, in his address, he tells the Convention, 
" Letters dismissory have been received and accepted by me as fol- 
lows," and then gives a list of clergymen received from other Dio- 
ceses ; but Mr. Crummell's name is not among them ! 

The powers of our Conventions, like those of our State Legisla- 
tures, are limited by written constitutions. The Fourth Article of 
the Constitution of the Pennsylvania Diocese declares that " every 
clergyman of the Church, of whatever order, being a settled minis- 
ter of some parish in this State, shall be entitled to a seat and vote in 
the Convention" provided he has had a canonical residence of a cer- 
tain time, &c. The Tenth Article prescribes the mode of altering the 
Constitution, by the joint action of two successive Conventions, and 
thus takes away the power of doing it by a simple resolution. 

Ruffian mobs had on several occasions, within the past few years, 
assailed the unoffending blacks in Philadelphia, sacked their dwell- 
ings, and torn down their houses of worship, and all on account of 
the complexion their Maker had given them. And how was this 
wicked, cruel prejudice against color, rebuked by the Episcopal 
Church in Pennsylvania ? Why, the Convention, at the instigation 
of the Bishop, " Resolved, That the following clause be added to 
the 8th revised Regulation adopted in 1829, and hereafter to be 
taken as part thereof : ' No Church in this Diocese, in like peculiar 
circumstances with the African Church of St. Thomas, shall be en- 
titled to send a clergyman or deputies to the Convention, or to in- 
terfere with the general government of the Church.' " Thus were 
colored clergymen and colored Christians driven, in contempt and 
utter violation of canonical law, from the enclosure of the Church? 
as they had been, by abandoned wretches, from the sanctuary of 
their own homes. The Bishop, Clergy, and Lay Deputies of the 
Pennsylvania Church, make common cause with the rioters in the 
streets, in a general crusade against negroes and mulattoes ! This 
act of the Convention brands for all future time every minister of 
Christ, and every member of his mystical body, who may trace his 



39 

descent from the land of Cyprian and Tertullian, as belonging to a 
distinct and degraded caste, and debars them from all participa- 
tion in the government of the Redeemer's Church. This act forci- 
bly thrusts a portion of the Church into schism, and repudiates 
one of the fundamental conditions on which the Diocese of Penn- 
sylvania consented, in 1784, to acknowledge a general ecclesias- 
tical government in the United States, viz., "That to make ca- 
nons and laws, there be no other authority than that of a repre- 
sentative body of the clergy and laity conjointly." The great 

truth, "HE HATH MADE US, AND NOT WE OURSELVES," is Set 

at naught by the Pennsylvania Convention ; and in the indul- 
gence of an " unrighteous prejudice," or in a cowardly submis- 
sion to it, they have sacrificed both the independence and the unity 
of the Church, the dignity of the ministerial office, and that love 
which Christ made the badge and test of discipleship. And this 
lawless and profane excision of their brethren, these men at- 
tempted to veil under the strange and indefinite phraseology of" all in 
like peculiar circumstances with the African Church of St. Thomas !" 
If anything can possibly add to the shame of this transaction, it is 
that the vote was taken without discussion : not one single member 
of that large body, Clergyman or Layman, having the independence 
to rise in his place and protest against an act, at variance alike with 
the principles of the Church, and the precepts of its Divine Head. 
And what is the apology, the only apology which the Churchmen 
of Pennsylvania can offer for this wanton insult and oppression of 
their colored brethren ? an apology that aggravates, instead of ex- 
cusing their conduct. Popular prejudice required that colored 
Clergymen and delegates should be excluded from the Convention ! It 
is disheartening to the patriot, to see our public men, those to whom 
high and important trusts are confided, so often governing them- 
selves, not by the immutable principles of justice and rectitude, but 
by the ever varying opinions of the multitude. But, oh ! it is sick- 
ening to the soul, to witness the Church of Christ sacrificing to 
popular clamor, her own holy and glorious attribute of being a light 
and a guide to a benighted and a sinful world. 

Bishop Onderdonk of New York, in his charge of 1843, to the 
Convention, remarked : " Taking the Gospel for our guide, we must 
see in the Church and the world, essentially antagonistic bodies. 
The Church was formed not to co-operate with the world, but to 
oppose it — to attack the wicked principles and practices to which it 



40 

is in bondage, and to come to no terms with it on any other princi- 
ples than its entire surrender of its opposition to the pure and holy 
spirit of the Gospel, and its entire submission to the rule which 
Christ, through his Church, would establish over it for good .... 
Let us ever, by the grace of God, be careful that in our intercourse 
with it, we adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour in all things ; 
and then go forward in our Master's work, indifferent save for its 
own sake, whether the world be pleased or offended; and, indeed, 
looking for the ill will and opposition from it, which that Master 
and his divine Word have prepared us to expect." 

Glorious truths ! godly counsels ! worthy of an age of martyrs 
and confessors. Alas, that they should have been in the lips of him 
who uttered them, Vox et preterea nihil! Let the diary of the 
young candidate for orders, given in the " History," tell how this 
bold spoken Bishop crouched before a prejudice which his own 
tongue confessed to be "unrighteous;" and sacrificed duty and in- 
dependence, lest the Seminary should lose the support of " the 
South!" 

Rank and caste are essentially different ; and while the former is 
sanctioned by the Bible, which requires us to render honor to those 
to whom honor is due, the latter is heathenish in its origin and 
character. Rank is founded on condition, and is usually connected 
with personal distinctions and acquirements. It unavoidably springs 
from the organization of society ; and while it may confer privileges, 
is not necessarily inconsistent with the claims of justice and 
humanity. Caste, on the contrary, regards races, irrespective of the 
individuals composing them. In Hindostan, it both elevates and 
depresses — with us, its only effects are degradation, cruelty and 
wretchedness. In the former country, the two extremes of caste 
are the Brahmins and the Soodras,* and the gulf between them is 
* " Soodras may be frequently seen carrying water in a cup, and entreating 
the first Brahmin they meet, to put his toe into it ; after which they drink the 
water, and bow or prostrate themselves before the Brahmin, who bestows his 
blessing upon them. Others preserve some of this holy water in their houses. 
Not only is the body of a Soodra laid prostrate before the Brahmin, to lick the 
dust of his feet, but his soul is also sacrificed to his honor. If a Soodra dare to 
listen to the Salvation-giving Vedu, he is to be punished for his sacrilege. If 
a Brahmin happen to be repeating any part of the Vedu aloud, a Soodra, if 
near, shuts his ears, and runs away. If a Soodra enter the cook-room of a 
Brahmin, the latter throws away all his earthen vessels as defiled; nay, the 
very touch of a Soodra makes a Brahmin unclean, and compels him to bathe 
in order to wash away the stain." — Ward's View of the Hindoos, pp. 79, 107. 



41 

wider and more impassable than that which in our own separates 
the whites and the blacks. And yet the American Church may- 
learn an edifying lesson from the temporary cessation of caste in the 
presence of a Hindoo idol. " I was surprised," says Dr. Claudius 
Buchanan, in the journal of his tour to the Temple of Juggernaut, 
in Orissa, in 1806, " to see the Brahmins with their heads uncovered, 
in the open plain, and falling down in the midst of the Soodras, be- 
fore the horrid shape, and mingling so complacently with that 
' polluted caste ;' but this proved what I had before heard, that so 
great a God is this, that the dignity of high caste disappears before 
him. This great king recognizes no distinction of rank among his 
subjects. All men are equal in his presence." 

We have long gloried in the conviction, not only that we are a 
true Church, but that, besides ourselves, there is none other. Too 
many among us are disposed to look down upon Christians of other 
names, with much the same feeling with which the Pharisee beheld 
the Publican who came to the Temple to pray. It seems to be not 
unfrequently forgotten, that the glory of the Church consists, not in 
her organization, nor in her rites and ceremonies, but in her holi- 
ness, which, like the Shechinah of the ancient temple, proclaims 
the presence of the Divine Lord. 

The Church is, unquestionably, spiritually diseased, so far as she 
ceases to be, in the language of Bishop Onderdonk, " antagonistic to 
the world, and to attack its wicked principles and practices." Tried 
by this test, what is the comparative health and vitality of the Penn- 
sylvania Episcopal Convention, and the Pennsylvania Presbyterian 
Synod ? The latter body, like the first, is composed of Clerical and 
Lay Deputies ; and although named from the State in which most 
of its members reside, embraces various churches in Maryland. On 
the 30th Sept., 1839, the Synod held its session at Elkton, in the 
latter State ; and of course in the midst of slaveholders. Two 
colored members took their seats, and assisted in organizing the 
body. Their presence excited the indignation of some of the rabble 
in Elkton ; and a letter was addressed to a member, recommending the 
retirement of the two delegates. The letter was shown to them, and 
they immediately left the town. The Synod was uninformed of what 
had occurred, until after their departure, whereupon the following 
resolution was adopted : " Whereas, this Synod have learned that two 
of their number, the Rev. Jacob Rhodes, and Mr. Stephen H. Glou- 
cester, colored Brethren, have withdrawn, and returned to their 



42 

homes, in consequence of representations that their presence occa- 
sioned some unusual excitement in a portion of the community, 
therefore, Resolved, that the Synod regret the existence of a preju- 
dice so unreasonable ; and, especially, regret that their Brethren, 
whose right to a seat in this body stands on the same basis as that 
of any of its members, should have felt themselves called upon to 
relinquish privileges to which they were justly entitled, and in the 
enjoyment of which they should have been sacredly protected." 

The Rev. Mr. Kip, in his recent work,* describing a visit he 
made to the Propaganda College in Rome, says : " The students, 
about eighty in number, were ranged on the two sides of the chapel, 
and presented a strange mixture of all nations and colors. I count- 
ed among them five Chinese, and two Africans. Yet here they all 
sat side by side, without any distinction, singing together the 
praises of their common Lord. Surely it must be acknowledged that, 
in this respect, Rome carries out her own Catholic principles, and 
declares not only in words but by her actions, that ' God hath made 
of one blood all nations of men, to dwell on the face of the earth.' 
She recognizes no distinctions of climate or country in the house of 
God. We had just before, as we entered the door of the chapel, 
witnessed a similar evidence of this Catholic spirit. An old man, 
black as possible, in an ecclesiastical dress, was just getting into a 
carriage. He was assisted by two priests, who, with many bows 
and demonstrations of respect, were taking leave of him." 

We trust Mr. Kip remembered with pain the exclusion of colored 
candidates for orders from the " Propaganda " of his own Church, 
and the obloquy heaped on his colored brethren in the ministry, 
by the Pennsylvania Convention, and that he will joyfully aid in 
infusing into the Episcopal Church " the Catholic principles " so 
honorably manifested by Papists at Rome, and Presbyterians at 
Elkton. 

In the course of these remarks we have expressed ourselves 
strongly, because we felt deeply ; and on reviewing our language 
we see no cause to modify it. But while we cannot doubt that the 
acts we have censured were morally wrong, we are too painfully 
sensible of the frailty of our common nature, to intimate that a 
Christian profession, to be sincere, must be without offence. Nor 
are we forgetful of the power of pecuniary interest, parochial de- 
pendence, and habitual prejudice, in warping the judgment, beguiling 

* Christmas Holidays in Rome. 1846. 



43 

the conscience, and hardening the heart, in relation to slavery and 
caste. Much, also, of what has been wrong in our ecclesiastical 
proceedings, has unquestionably arisen, not from reflection, but the 
want of it. Nevertheless, the responsibilities of the Church are of 
awful magnitude, extending to the life that now is, and to that which 
is to come ; and they are shared by all her members, however 
humble. 

The Church militant will find her strength and safety only in un- 
ceasing conflict with the world, however dire may be the strife. 
The blood of martyrs has ever proved the seed of the Church. But 
when she grows faint-hearted, and distrusting the " armor of 
righteousness " provided by the Captain of her salvation, seeks for 
weapons of earthly mould, and calls to her aid the selfish passions and 
sinful prejudices of society, she is treacherous to her Lord, and forms 
a truce with his enemies fatal to herself. Henceforth her energies, 
no longer directed against the strongholds of sin, are wasted in 
" doubtful disputations," and on unprofitable rites and ceremonies. 
The world is satisfied, and applauds her discretion and moderation, 
because, although she may retain the form of Godliness, she has 
parted with its power. 

Had the American Church from the first fought a good fight 
against Slavery and Caste, these abominations, which now so much 
impair her usefulness, and so widely extend the dominion of the 
great enemy of souls, would have been swept from our land ; a new 
proof would have been given of the divine character of our holy 
religion, and the Christian priesthood would have acquired new 
claims to the gratitude and reverence of mankind. Our Church has 
hitherto erred in no small measure from ignorance and inadvertence. 
Such a plea can no longer avail her. A voice from abroad — a 
voice she can neither stifle nor deride — calls her to repentance and 
reformation. The reproof of Bishop Wilberforce must and will be 
heard. The sensibilities of Christians in our land are awakening to 
the momentous questions to which we have referred. The various 
denominations around us are daily breaking the ties which have 
hitherto bound them to the cause of the oppressor. Numerous 
Churchmen among ourselves are complaining of the league which 
their clergy and representative bodies have formed with human bon- 
dage ; and the Church of England is marking and lamenting the de- 
linquencies of her daughter. If the Church values the approbation 
of her Divine Master ; if she appreciates the character and objects of 



44 

her own holy mission ; if she desires to avoid agitation in her coun- 
cils, she must be more than the promulgator and advocate of an ab- 
stract theology, however pure and truthful in itself. She must prac- 
tically exhibit the blessed Gospel as at once the antagonist and 
corrective of every form of wickedness that mars the happiness of 
man in this world, as well as the next ; she must, in short, manifest 

FAITH WHICH WORKETH BY LOVE, PURIFIETH THE HEART, AND OVER- 
COMETH THE WORLD. 



A REPROOF OP THE AMERICAN CHURCH, 

BY THE BISHOP OF OXFORD. 

3XTRACTBD FROM HIS " HISTORY OP THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH IN AMERICA." 



In forming an estimate of the moral influence of the Epis- 
copalian body, we cannot fail to notice its bearing on the 
treatment of the colored race. This is, in America, the great 
question of the present generation : socially, politically, mo- 
rally, religiously, there is none which can compare with it. 
Never in the history of any people was the righteous retribu- 
tion of the holy and living God more distinctly marked than 
in the manifold evils which now trouble America for her 
treatment of the African race. Like all other sinful courses, 
it has brought in, day by day, confusion and entanglement 
into all the relations of those contaminated by it. It is the 
cause which threatens to disorganize the Union ; it is the 
cause which upholds the power of mobs and " Lynching ;" 
it is the occasion of bloodshed and violated law ; it is, through- 
out the South, the destroyer of family purity, the hindrance 
to the growth of civilisation and refinement ; it is the one 
weak point of America as a nation, exposing her to the 
deadliest internal strife, that of an internecine war, whenever 
a foreign enemy should find it suit his purpose to arm the 
blacks against their masters. Further, like all other great 
and established evils, it is most difficult to devise any escape 
out of the coils which it has already wound around every 
civil and social institution ; whilst every day of its permitted 
continuance both aggravates the evil and increases the diffi- 
culty of its ultimate removal. This, then, is exactly one of 
those sore evils of which the Church of Christ is the appointed 
healer. She must, in His name, rebuke this unclean spirit ; 
she who has been at all times the best adjuster of the balance 
between the rich and poor, between those who have and 
those who want; she who has redressed the wrongs of those 
who have no helper ; she who, wherever she has settled, has 



46 

changed slaves or serfs, by whatever title they are known, 
into freemen and peasants ; — >she must do this in the west, 
or the salt of the earth hath lost its savour, and is given over, 
with all things around, to the wasting of that utter and ex- 
treme corruption which she should have arrested. 

Now, to see how far the Church has fulfilled this her voca- 
tion, we must have distinctly before us the real posture of 
this question in America. Of the twenty-six states, thirteen 
are slave states ; admitting, that is, within their own borders, 
the institution of Slavery as a part of their institutions ; and 
of these, five — Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, and, 
in part, Tennessee — are slave-selling, whilst those south of 
them are slave-buying states. 

It will, therefore, be seen at once, that in the various dis- 
tricts of the Union widely different parts of the system are at 
work. But its curse is upon all. Chiefly does it rest upon 
the South. There, to his own, and little less to his master's 
degradation, the slave is held in direct personal bondage, 
and accounted merely as a chattel. Hence, at the caprice of 
his owner, he is treated not unfrequently with fearful cruelty : 
though these, it may be granted, are not the ordinary cases ; 
since, except under the impulses of passion, no rational owner 
will misuse his own chattels. It is not, therefore, for these 
instances of cruelty, fearful as they occasionally are, that the 
system will be chiefly odious in the Christian's eyes.* Nor 

* Not to quote any of those occasional barbarities which may be turned in 
some measure aside as extreme cases, it is impossible to deny the ordinary 
cruelty of the system, when every Southern newspaper abounds in such adver- 
tisements as these : " Ten dollars reward for my woman Siby, very much 
scarred about the neck and ears by whipping." Mobile Commercial Advertiser. — 
" Committed to jail, a negro slave ; his back is very badly scarred." Planter's 
Intelligencer, Sept. 26, 1838. — " Run away, negress Caroline ; had on a collar 
with one prong turned down." Bee, Oct. 27, 1837. — " Detained at the police- 
jail the negro wench Myra; has several marks of lashing, and has irons on her 
feet." Bee, June 9, 1838. — " Run away, a negro woman and two children ; a few 
days before she went off, I burnt her with a hot iron on the left side of her 
face : 1 tried to make the letter M." Standard, July 18, 183S. — " Brought to 

jail, John , left ear cropt." Macon Telegraph, Dec. 25, 1837. — " Run away, a 

negro named Humbledon ; limps on his left foot, where he was shot a few 
weeks ago while a runaway." Vicksburg Register, Sept.i5, 1838. — " Run away, a 
black woman, has a scar on her back and right arm, caused by a rifle-ball." 
Natchez Courier,. June 15, 1832. 



47 

will it be from any notions of the abstract and inalienable 
rights of man. On these, in their common signification of 
the possession of political power, we do not touch ; it is with 
the want of personal freedom we are concerned, nor is it 
needful to assert, that slavery is, under all circumstances, 
directly forbidden by the law of God. It is enough for our 
purpose, that, as administered in America, it is a violation of 
the Christian precept, " Honor all men ;" that by its denial 
of all family life, its necessary irreligion, and its enforced 
ignorance, it deprives the slave of the privileges of redeemed 
humanity, and is directly opposed to the idea of the Chris- 
tian revelation. To maintain this ground it is not necessary 
to assert that no slaves are happy in their servitude. For the 
happiest slave in American servitude is the greatest proof of 
the evil of the system. He is most utterly debased by it who 
can be happy in such a state. What that state is, is plain 
enough. The common language of the slave states, which 
has given to all those who labor the title of " mean whites," 
is abundant proof of their own estimate of Slavery. But, 
further, as a general rule, the slave is not happy. The advo- 
cates of the system confess this in a thousand ways. Their 
columns of advertisements for runaways, their severe laws 
against those who aid or harbor fugitives, their occasional 
gifts of liberty to slaves who have wrought some great act of 
public good, their fierce jealousy of all speech or action which 
threatens ever so remotely their property in man, all bespeak 
the same secret conviction : — they do know the misery of 
Slavery. The testimony of the Canadian ferryman,* who 
described the leap of the escaped slave, when the boat reaches 
the British shore, as unlike any other, is not more directly to 
the point. 

Accordingly, the master-evil of the South is, that the slaves 
are not treated as having souls ; they are often petted, often 
treated like spoiled children, never as men. On this point 
there is no dispute. " Generally speaking they are a nation 
of heathen in the midst of the land. They are without hope 

* Retrospect of Western Travel, vol. i., p. 114. 



48 

and without God in the world."* " They have no Bible to 
read by their own firesides ; they have no family altars ; and 
when in affliction, sickness, or death, they have no minister 
to address to them the consolations of the gospel."f " They 
are destitute of the privileges of the gospel, and ever will be, 
under the present state of things. They may justly be con- 
sidered the heathen of this country, and will bear a compari- 
son with heathen in any country in the world.":]: •' Through- 
out the bounds of the Charleston synod there are at least one 
hundred thousand slaves, speaking the same language as the 
whites, who have never heard of the plan of salvation by a 
Redeemer."§ And this is the fruit of no accident, — it is in- 
herent in the system. The black must be depressed below 
the level of humanity to be kept down to his condition. On 
this system his master dare not treat him as a man. To 
teach slaves to read is forbidden under the severest penalties 
in almost every slave state. In North Carolina, to teach a 
slave to read or write, or give him any book (the Bible not 
excepted), is punished with thirty-nine lashes or imprison- 
ment, if the offender be a free negro ; with a fine of 200 dol- 
lars if he be a white. In Georgia this fine is 500 dollars ; 
and the father is not suffered to teach his half-caste child to 
read the Scriptures ?|| 

The moral state of such a population need not be depicted. 
The habit of despising the true redeemed humanity in those 
around them grows always upon the licnetious and the 
covetous, as they allow themselves to use their fellows as the 
mere instruments of their gain or pleasure : and in the slave 
states this evil habit reigns supreme. The quadroon^ girls 
are educated in the South to live in bonds of shame with 

* Sermon by Rev. C. C. Jones, preached in Georgia before two associations 
of planters, 1831. 

t Report in Synod of South Carolina and Georgia, 1833. 

X Report of the Synod of South Carolina and Georgia, to whom was refer- 
red the subject of the religious instruction of the colored population, 1834. 

$ Charleston S. C. Ohserver. 

|| Caste and Slavery in the American Church, p. 27 ; a noble and heart- 
stirring protest. 

1 The mixed breed of the third generation. 



49 

iheir white masters. With the slave-population itself the 
licentiousness of the whites is utterly unbridled : and by this 
all the ties of nature are dissolved. Family-life amongst the 
slaves cannot exist; its fountains are always liable to be 
poisoned by arbitrary power. White fathers view their own 
slave-born children as chattels. They work, they sell them. 
By law they cannot teach them, or set them free ; for the 
jealousy of slave-state legislation lays it down as a first prh> 
ciple, that every slave must have a master " to see to him." 

Here, then, in brief, is the curse of the southernmost 
or slave-buying states;— <the holding of property in man, 
keeping men in servile bondage, using persons as things, re- 
deemed men as soul-less chattels ; — this is its essence. Here 
the testimony of the Church must be against this first vicious 
principle. This has been the example set to God's witnesses 
in this generation by their fathers in the faith. They pro- 
tested against such dominant iniquities, and they delivered 
their own souls, and saved us their children from the eating 
canker of a blood-stained inheritance. " Let no man from 
henceforth," said the Christian Council of London, in 1102,* 
" presume to carry on that wicked traffic, by which men in 
England have been hitherto sold like brute animals." This 
must be the Church's rule on the banks of the Mississippi, 
as it was on those of the Thames. So much for the extreme 
south. 

As we come one degree northward, other features meet 
us. In the slave-selling states there is added to the evils of 
the South the execrable trade of breeding slaves for sale. By 
it " the ' Ancient Dominion' is converted into one grand me- 
nagerie, where men are reared for the market like oxen for 
the shambles."f This is no figure of speech. The number 
of slaves exported, from Virginia alone, for sale in the South- 

* " Concilium Londinense, a.d. 1102, reg. Angliae Hen. I. 3, statutum est: 
xxviii. Nequis illud nefarium negotium, quo hactenus homines in Anglia. 
solebant velutbruta animalia venundari, deinceps ullatenus facere praesumat." 
— Wilkins, Concilia, vol. i., p. 383. 

t Speech of Thomas Jefferson Randolph in the Legislature of Virginia in 
1832. 

4 



50 

em states, in one year, 1835-36, amounted to forty thou- 
sand;* whilst those imported from all quarters into the 
states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas, 
were reckoned in the year 1836 as not less than 25,000.f 
" Dealing in slaves," says a Baltimore newspaper^ of 1829, 
" has become a large business ; establishments are made in 
several places in Maryland and Virginia, at which they are 
sold like cattle : these places of deposit are strongly built, 
and well supplied with iron thumb-screws and gags." 

The abominations of this trade must not pollute these 
pages. They may be readily conceived. But as a neces- 
sary part of such a traffic, an internal slave-trade, with its well- 
known horrors, recommences. Here are slave-auctions, with 
all their instant degradation, and all their consequent destruc- 
tion of family and social life.§ Here are droves of chained 

* Virginia Times. t Natchez Courier. 

i The Baltimore (Maryland) Register. 

§ One incident will tell this whole tale. " A gentleman of Virginia sold a 
female slave. The party professing to buy not being prepared to make the 
necessary payment, the slave was to be re-sold. A concealed agent of the 
trade bought her and her two children, as for his own service; where her hus- 
band, also a slave in the town, might visit her and them. Both the husband 
and wife suspected that she would be privately sent away. The husband, in 
their common agony, offered to be sold, that he might go with her. This was 
declined. He resolved on the last effort of assisting her to escape. That he 
might lay suspicion asleep, he went to take leave of her and his children, and 
appeared to resign himself to the event. This movement had its desired 
effect ; suspicion was withdrawn both from him and his wife, and he succeeded 
in emancipating them. Still, what was to be done with his treasure, now he 
had obtained it? Flight was impossible, and nothing remained but conceal- 
ment ; and concealment seemed hopeless, for no place would be left unsearched, 
and punishment would fall on the party who should give them shelter. How- 
ever, they were missing ; and they were sought for diligently, but not found. 
Some months afterwards, it was casually observed that the floor under a 
slave's bed (the sister of the man) looked dirty and greasy. A board was 
taken up, and there lay the mother and her children on the clay, and in an ex- 
cavation of three feet by five ! It is averred that they had been there, in a cold 
and enclosed space, hardly large enough for their coffin (buried alive there), 
for six months ! 

" This is not all. The agent was only provoked by this circumstance ! He 
demanded the woman ; and though every one was clamorous to redeem her 
and return her to her husband, he would not sell ! She was taken to his slave- 
pen, and has disappeared ! The man — most miserable man ! — still exists in 
the town." — Drs. Reed and Matheson, ut supra, vol. ii., p. 188, 



51 

negroes marched under the whip, two and two, from the 
breeding district of Virginia to the labor-markets of Georgia 
and Alabama. 

Here, then, as in the farther South, the testimony of the 
Church must be uncompromising and explicit. No molives 
of supposed expediency, no possible amount of danger, can 
justify her silence. She is set to bear a witness ; a witness 
against the evils round her ; a witness at all hazards ; a wit- 
ness to be at any time attested, if so it needs must be, by 
bearing any amount of persecution. She and she only can 
do this. The exceeding jealousy of the several states makes 
them resent with peculiar warmth any interference from with- 
out. The regulation of its internal concerns, and so the 
whole continuance and system of Southern Slavery, is solely 
under the jurisdiction of the several states. Congress can- 
not mitigate, much less abolish it. It can come before Con- 
gress only incidentally, — as, for instance, on the question of 
admitting a new slave state into the Union. Even moral 
influence from without is bitterly resented by the South. 
This is its ground of quarrel with the abolition societies ; 
with which the general government has so far sympathized 
as to leave unredressed fthe violation of the Southern post- 
office, whereby abolition-papers are uniformly excluded from 
the South. Thus, at this moment, improvement can only 
arise from a higher standard of internal principle on this 
great question. This, it is the business of the Church to 
create. She must assert her Catholic character on behalf of 
these unhappy cast-aways. In other respects, there is no 
country upon earth so fitted by predisposing elements for 
uniting in one visible body all the company of Christ's re- 
deemed. Gathered, as they are, from all countries, Ameri- 
cans are made partakers, even from natural causes, of a 
common political and social life. The strong lethargic com- 
mon sense of the Dutch and the gay vivacity of the French, 
the phlegm of the German and the buoyant thoughtlessness 
of the Irish, the shrewd money-getting temper of the Yankee 
and the hospitable elegance of the Southern gentleman, — are 



52 

all here fused into one common mass. From this universal 
brotherhood the African alone is shut altogether out. Him 
the Church must take by the hand, and owning him as one 
of Christ's body, must lead him into the family of man. 
Not that she is bound to preach insurrection and rebellion- 
Far from it. It is quite easy to enforce upon the slave his 
duties, under a system, the unrighteousness of which is, at 
the same lime, clearly stated. His bonds are illegal ; but it 
is God's arm, and not his own violence, which must break 
them. Let the clergy of the South preach submission to the 
slave, if at the same time they declare to his master that these, 
for whom Christ died, are now no longer slaves, but brethren 
beloved ;* and that a system which withholds from them 
their Christian birthright is utterly unlawful ; that it is one 
which the master, not the slave, is bound to set himself hon- 
estly to sweep away. Above all should they, at any cost 
and by any sacrifice, protest in life and by act against this 
grievous wrong. The greater the cost, and the more painful 
the sacrifice, the clearer will be their testimony, and the more 
it will avail : to them it is given not only to believe in Christy 
but also to suffer for His sake. 

What witness, then, has as yet been borne by the Church 
in these slave states against this almost universal sin ? How 
has she fulfilled her vocation ? She raises no voice against the 
predominant evil; she palliates it in theory; and in practice she 
shares in it. The mildest and most conscientious of the Bishops 
of the South are slaveholders themselves. Bishop Moore of 
Virginia writes to Bishop Ravenscroft :f " The good and 
excellent girl presented to my daughter by Mrs. Ravenscroft 
paid the debt of nature on the 4th." She was treated, it is 
true, with all the indulgence which she could receive, but 
still, favorite as she was, she was a slave ; and, after her 
death, was laid " in the colored burial-ground, which is not 
enclosed, and therefore much exposed, and where the grave 

* " Not now as a servant (lit. a slave, 6ov\os), but above a servant, a brother 
beloved." — Philemon 16. 
t Life of Bishop Moore, p. 282. 



53 

was liable to be disturbed/' This is no rare instance. 
The Bishop of Georgia has openly proposed to maintain 
" The Montpelier Institute" by the produce of slave-labor ; 
and " The Spirit of Missions," edited with the sanction of 
the Church, and under the eye of the Bishop (Onderdonk) 
of New York, proposes to endow a mission-school in Loui- 
siana, with a plantation to be worked by slaves, who should 
be encouraged to redeem themselves by extra hours of labor, 
before day in the morning and after night in the evening ; 
and should, when thus redeemed, be transported to Liberia, 
and the price received for them laid out in " purchasing in 
Virginia or Carolina a gang of people who may be nearly 
double the number of those sent away."* 

Nor are these merely evil practices into which, unawares 
and against their principles, these men have fallen. In a 
sermon preached before the Bishop of North Carolina in 
1834, and published with his special commendation, it is 
openly asserted, that " no man or set of men are entitled to 
pronounce Slavery wrong ; and we may add, that as it exists 
in the present day it is agreeable to the order of Divine Pro- 
vidence ;" whilst the Bishop of South Carolina,! m an a d" 
dress to the Convention of his diocese, denounced " the ma- 
lignant philanthropy of abolition." 

Such are the fearful features of the life of Churchmen in 
the South. Nor is it any real lessening of this guilt to say 
that it is shared by all the Christian sects. The charge is, 
indeed, far too nearly true. There is no doubt that the evils 
of the system may be found still ranker and more gross amidst 
the prevailing sects of Baptists, Independents, Methodists, 
and Presbyterians.^ But this is no excuse. It is the first 
duty of the Church to reprove the sins of others, not to adopt 
them into her own practice ; to set, and not to take the tone. 
The cruelty of their tender mercies should lead her to speak 
out more plainly ; it should force her zealously to cleanse 

* Caste and Slavery, p. 34. t Bishop Bowen. 

t Vide Slavery and the Internal Slave-trade in America, pp. 133-145, for 
horrors with which these pages shall not be polluted. 
4* 



54 

herself from their stain, and then fearlessly leave the issue to 
her God. But she is silent here ; and to her greater shame 
it must be added, that there are sects* which do maintain 
the witness she has feared to bear. 

But further, as has been already said, this clinging curse 
reaches even to the free states of the North, though it assumes 
in them another form. In them it leads to the treatment of 
the colored race with deep and continual indignity. They 
cannot be held in personal bondage, but they are of the ser- 
vile class ; they may be claimed as runaways, and thus drag- 
ged, if not kidnapped, to Southern slavery. 

A mingled scorn and hatred of the colored man pervades 
every usage of society. In the courts of law his testimony 
is not equally received with the white man's evidence ; repub- 
lican jealousy forgets its usual vigilance, in order to deny 
him his equal vote ; he may be expelled with insult from the 
public vehicle ; he must sit apart in the public assembly ; 
and though no tinge of remaining shade may darken his 
cheek, yet a traditional descent from colored blood will make 
it impossible for him to wed with any of the European race. 
Even in the fierce heat of the " revivals" this supreme law of 
separation is never for a moment overlooked. There are 
different " pens" for the white and colored subjects of this com- 
mon enthusiasm. On all these points feeling runs higher in 
the free North than in the slave states of the South. There the 
dominion of the master is supreme, and he can venture when 
it pleases him to treat his slave with any degree of intimacy ; 
for the beast of the field might, with as high a probability as 
he, claim equal rights with man. But in the North, where 
the colored race are free and often rich, the galling insults of 

* The Quakers, and four small sects, the Reformed Presbyterians, United 
Brethren, Primitive Methodists, and Emancipation Baptists. — Slavery and the 
Internal Slave-trade in America, p. 132. 

The annual conference of the United Brethren of Maryland and Virginia 
passed, in 1839, the following resolution. " It appeared in evidence that Moses 
Michael was the owner of a female slave, which is contrary to the discipline 
of our Church. Conference therefore resolved, that unless brother Michael 
manumit or set free such slave in six months, he no longer be considered a 
member of our Church." — American Churches the Bulwark of Slavery, p. 3. 



55 

caste are needful to keep up the separation between blood 
and blood ; and here therefore, more than anywhere, its con- 
ventional injustice is supreme ; here, too, by- an enforced 
silence as to the crimes of Southern slavery, a guilty fellow- 
ship in its enormities is too commonly established. 

Against these evils, then, the Church must here testify ; 
she must proclaim that God hath made of one blood all 
nations of the earth ; she must protest against this unchristian 
system of caste ; her lips must be unsealed to denounce 
God's wrath against the guilty customs of the South. And 
what has been her conduct ? If we seek to test her real 
power over men's hearts by asking what her influence has 
been, we shall rate it low indeed. No voice has come 
forth from her. The Bishops of the North sit in open con- 
vention with their slaveholding brethren, and no canon pro- 
claims it contrary to the discipline of their Church to hold 
property in man and treat him as a chattel. Nay, further, the 
worst evils of the world have found their way into the Church. 
The colored race must worship apart ; they must not enter 
the white man's church ; or if they do, they must be fenced 
off into a separate corner. In some cases their dust may not 
moulder in the same cemetery. Whilst " all classes of white 
children voluntarily attend the Sunday-schools on terms of 
perfect equality,"* any mixture of African blood will exclude 
the children of the wealthiest citizen. Recent events have 
shown that all this is not the evil fruit of an old custom 
slowly wearing itself out ; but that it springs from a living 
principle which is daily finding for itself fresh and wider 
developments. 

The General Theological Seminary, founded, as we have 
seen, at New York under the superintendence of the whole 
Church, was designed to secure a general training for all its 
presbyters. " Every person producing to the faculty," so ran 
its statutes, " satisfactory evidence of his having been admit- 
ted a candidate for holy orders, with full qualifications, ac- 
cording to the canons of the Protestant Episcopal Church in 

* Caswall, p. 297. 



56 

the United States, shall be received as a student of the semi- 
nary."* Curiosity once prompted the question to Bishop 
Hobart, the founder of the seminary, " whether this wide rule 
embraced colored candidates ?" " They would be admitted," 
was his answer, " as a matter of course and without doubt.' 7 
Such, alas ! is not the rule of his successor in the Bishop's 
seat. In June, 1839, Alexander Crummell applied for ad- 
mission ; he came from three years' study at the Oneida 
Institute, from sharing equal rights with one hundred white 
students ; he brought with him a character which, it was 
conceded, would warrant his admission if it could be right 
to admit a colored man at all : he was rejected for this single 
fault ; one Bishop (Doane) alone being found to protest 
against the step. Three years before, a similar injustice had 
been wrought.f Both remain to this day unredressed. The 

* Statutes of the General Theological Seminary, chap, vii., sec. 1. See Act 
of Incorporation, 1S36, p. 16. 

t The diary of the young man then rejected tells so simply all the tale, that 
it is printed here from " Caste and Slavery," pp. 14, 15: — 

" Oct. 10. — On Wednesday last I passed my examination before the faculty 
of the seminary, and was thereupon admitted a member of the school of the 
prophets. 

" Oct 11. — I called upon the Bishop, and he was dissatisfied with the step I 
had taken in entering the seminary. Seems to apprehend difficulty from my 
joining the commons ; and thinks that the South, from which they receive much 
support, will object to my entering. 

" Thus far I have met with no difficulty from the students, but have been 
kindly treated. T have thought it judicious, however, to leave the commons 
for the present. 

" As far as in me lies I will, in my trouble, let all my actions be consistent 
with my Christian profession ; and instead of giving loose to mortified feel- 
ings, will acquiesce in all things ; but this acquiescence shall not in the least 
degree partake of dogged submissiveness, which is the characteristic of an 
inferior. 

" My course shall be independent, and then, if a cruel prejudice will drive 
(me) from the holy threshold of the school of piety, I, the weaker, must sub- 
mit and yield to the superior power. Into thy hands ever, O God, I commit 
my cause. 

" Oct. 12. — At 9 a. m. I called on our spiritual father again, and sought 
advice in relation to my present embarrassing circumstances. He gave me 
plainly to understand that it would be advisable, in his opinion, for me not to 
apply for a regular admission into the seminary, and, although I had taken a 
room, and even become settled, yet to vacate the room, and silently withdraw 



57 

Church fears to lose the contributions of the South ; she fears 
to raise the mobs of Philadelphia ; she dare not stand be- 
tween the dead and living : she cannot therefore stay the 
plague. Even when admitted to the sacred functions of the 
priesthood, the colored man is not the equal of his brethren. 
The Rev. Peter Williams, for years a New York presbyter, 
of blameless reputation, was, for this one cause, allowed no 
seat in the Convention of his Church. Thus, again, a special 

myself from the seminary. He further said that I might recite with the 
classes, and avail myself of the privileges of the institution, but not consider 
myself in the light of a regular member. Never, never will I do so ! 

•' The reasons of the Bishop for this course are as follows : 

" ' That the seminary receives much support and many students from the 
South, and consequently if they admit colored men to equal privileges with 
the whites in the institution, the South will refuse to aid (it), and (will) use 
their influence to keep all from the seminary south of the Potomac. As head 
of the seminary, and knowing the feelings and prejudices of the South, he could 
not hazard my fuller admission at such an expense. 

" '• From the extreme excitability of public feeling on this delicate subject, 
and from my known and intimate connection with the people of color, there 
would be a high probability not only of bringing the institution into disrepute, 
but of exciting opposing sentiment among the students, and thus causing many 
to abandon the school of the prophets.' 

" I think these two form the reasons'of the Bishop against my being admit- 
ted. The course, however, he advises, viz. the being a ' hanger-on' in the 
seminary, is something so utterly repugnant to my feelings as a man, that I 
cannot consent to adopt it. If I cannot be admitted regularly, I will leave the 
place ; but in leaving I will ever hold the utmost good feeling towards the 
faculty and my friends. It is a cruel prejudice which drives me so reluctantly 
from the door, and makes even those who make high pretensions to piety and 
purity say to me,' Stand thou there, for I am holier than thou.' 

" In this matter, however, I shall acquiesce as a Christian, but shall preserve 
the independent feelings of a man. My most devoted thanks are due to my 
dear friends, the Rev. Drs. Berrian and Lyell, for the earnest solicitude which 
they manifest for my welfare. They seem heartily to regret that any difficulty 
has arisen on the present subject. 

" Upon reflection, it is my present opinion that Bishop Onderdonk is wrong 
in yielding to the 'unrighteous prejudice' (his words) of the community. If 
the prejudice be wrong, I think he ought to oppose it without regard to conse- 
quences. If such men as he countenance it, they become partakers with the 
transgressors. He says, by and by Providence will open the way ; but will 
Providence effect the change miraculously ? We cannot expect it. He will, 
however, effect by appointed means, and these means ought to be resorted to 
by His instruments— men. And what men more suitable than men high in 
office/high in public favor, high [in talents ? Particularly should* men com- 



58 

canon of the diocese of Pennsylvania forbids the representa- 
tion of the African Church at Philadelphia, and excludes the 
rector from a seat.* 

Tried, then, by this test, what can we esteem the present 
influence of this body ? It plainly has not been conscious 
of possessing, power to stand up in God's name and to rebuke 
the evil one ; it has not healed this sore wound, which is 
wasting the true social life of America. It is a time for mar- 
tyrdom ; and the mother of the saints has scarcely brought 
forth even one confessor. 

It is not enough that the distinctive features which mark 
this communion should be kept clear and plain. There 
must also be a high tone on those great moral and social 
questions which are rising daily, and on which mere politi- 
cians have no utterance of principle. There must be no 
timid silence as to great enormities. In those mighty issues 
which indeed try the spirits of men, her voice must be clear. 
Thus, for example, the treatment of the negro population 
must be her care : the equal worth of the colored race must 
be unequivocally held and asserted by her. It must no 

missioned to preach the Gospel, which teaches mercy, righteousness, and 
truth, enter upon the work. What makes my case more aggravating and 
dreadful is, that the Bishop says, that even admitting I have no African blood 
in me, yet my identity with the people of color will bar the door of the semi- 
nary against me. Horrid inconsistency ! 

Oct. 13. — Called on the Bishop yesterday, and had a final interview with 
him on this mortifying subject. His determination was settled and fixed, that, 
from a sober consideration of all things, the interest of the seminary, the com- 
fort of myself, and the ultimate good of my people, I had better silently with- 
draw, and, agreeably to my plan, study privately with a clergyman. He again, 
at this interview, suggested the plan of my embracing the privileges of the 
seminary without being regularly admitted ; to which I would not consent, as 
it would be both a sacrifice of the feelings of a man, which I felt not disposed 
to offer, and, further, a sacrifice of principle, to which, I am confident, the 
noble-minded among my people would not allow me to submit. 

" I cannot but conceive my case to be a very peculiar one, involving much 
difficulty, and one which will ultimately cause the guardians and controllers 
of this sacred institution to hang their heads for shame. This day I am driven, 
in the presence of all the students of the seminary, and the sight of high Hea- 
ven, from the school of the prophets." 
* Caste and Slavery, p. 17. 



59 

longer be the reproach of the Protestant Episcopal Church 
that it is only in the Romish cathedral at New Orleans that 
whites and blacks are seen to kneel together,* as those who 
were made of one blood by one Father, and redeemed from 
common death through the cross of one only Saviour. Timid, 
compromising conduct on these great subjects, safe as it may 
seem at present, will, more than anything besides, weaken 
through the whole nation the moral weight of any religious 
body. By an universal law of God's providence, it is in doing 
battle for His truth that men exercise and train their own 
spirits, and subdue the herd of weaker minds to their rule and 
government. By its courage or unfaithfulness on this one 
question, the Church, as far as we can see, is fixing now for 
good or ill its true weight and standing in the coming gene- 
ration. 

* Retrospect of Western Travel, vol. i., p. 128. 



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